Shooting the messenger, by a different name
Yankee doodle: The Players’ Tribune keeps athletes’ views in controlled context
All those nice things we wrote about Derek Jeter, and this is the thanks we get? The Players’ Tribune? The great New York Yankees’ shortstop, who retired to an outpouring of adulation possibly unsurpassed in sport’s modern era — if you can think of someone sent off more lovingly, please provide details — had scarcely settled into his La-Z-Boy when he uncorked his new project, a web forum where pro athletes can write what’s on their minds without any filter between them and the fans.
By “filter” he means, you know, us. Scribes and TV and radio reporters and bloggers and people who not only relate the verbiage but interpret and inquire and ask followup questions and just generally irritate pro athletes who have much more important things to do than prolong their fourto five-hour work days by conversing with the rabble.
So now they can just say whatever they have to say once, in prose or podcast or video form, and cut out the messengers.
The site is accessible via Twitter (@PlayersTribune) or on the Web (theplayerstribune.com) and it got off to a strong start Thursday when the inaugural post was from Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, talking about abuse and domestic violence, and admitting, along the way, that he was a bully growing up.
So that was good, and harmless enough, and no doubt there’ll be more like that from sportsmen and women who will sense an opportunity to polish their images by delivering appealing messages under the safety of Jeter’s iconic umbrella.
But the scribe in me is suspicious and, to borrow an old saying: “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me.”
Already, team websites are pretty much monitoring every conversation in every dressing room with cameras and recorders, so that they can always be first with a sanitized version of any developments.
This is the trade: the same teams we write features and report stories about, keeping them in the daily headlines, are now in the business of competing with us for the news, trying to control the message.
You want bland? You’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.
And now, via The Players’ Tribune, whatever nuggets the team hasn’t already run through the sieve will be siphoned off by another agency — Derek Jeter, Publisher — that is guaranteed to further insulate the biggest names in sports from having to answer any inconvenient questions. Q: “Excuse me, Tom …” A: “I’ve already spoken. See my blog.”
“This is not trying to eliminate sportswriters,” Jeter said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“Sportswriters are what make sports great and fun to watch. This is just another avenue for the athletes to use and express themselves.”
An outspoken, irreverent voice from a different generation, former CFL offensive tackle Rob Murphy — who never seemed to shy from controversy and loved the notoriety — said we shouldn’t worry too much about it.
“I think it’s yet another forum for fans to get further access to the athletes they cherish,” he said, via a Twitter message (I know). “Also think athletes at times get bored answering the same questions over and over, as I’m sure reporters are asking (them). So overall I think it will be a good twist, but ultimately I think the fans will stick to the meat ’n potatoes … the reporters, TV and newspapers.”
Look, nobody cares about media problems. But in trying to bring analysis and perspective to the events you watch (or don’t watch) on TV, we occasionally get under people’s skin. This is an occupational hazard, one that Jeter evidently believes athletes shouldn’t have to put up with.
From the New York Times: “In a letter posted on the site, Jeter indicated that he had given calculated, dull responses throughout his career out of fear that they would be distorted.”
So there’s your actual axe to grind: the C-word. Context.
The fallback of every athlete who ever let something slip in conversation with a reporter that he later wishes he hadn’t said is “it was taken out of context.”
Athletes have even claimed to have been misquoted in their own autobiographies, which is pretty funny when you think about it.
But it does happen, now and then, and probably more often in tabloids — the New York kind, anyway, and the British — where molehills are regularly turned into volcanic mountains.
So caution served Jeter well in the media maelstrom in which he played and lived and partied.
“We just need to be sure our thoughts will come across the way we intend,” he said.
Or the way their agents and business advisers intend: sanitized so as not to offend, conscious that the message is helpful to the athlete’s image, carefully edited for grammar and spelling.
Filtered, in other words. But politely. By the right sort of people.