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Sports Figures and The Media
Media Needs to Back Off!
As a young, novice newspaper reporter — my ‘day job’ was as a lowly copy boy — I covered a number of high school football games for my (now long-gone) paper, The Louisville Times. It never would have occurred to me to follow the athletes into the locker room or to have an opportunity to otherwise engage them one-on-one after the game.
When a game was over, I went back to the office and cranked out a story — from my notes.
But that was then, and that was high school sports.
Now, such professional sports as tennis (the ITF), football (the NFL), and baseball (MLB) contractually require players to attend (and, ideally, participate in) meet-the-press session. Many athletes willingly go along with this ‘ritual’, even if it’s not necessarily in their best interest to do so.
‘Joe Dunker’?
Example: Joe Dunker of the Beantown Brownies can’t seem to elevate himself and so scores no points — dunks or otherwise — in a game his team just lost. The press will, of course, ask him such things as “How come you couldn’t get it up — no pun intended — today?”
How should he answer that?
Bigger question, why should be have to answer that?
