Men's Journal

You are guilty of bringing Access Hollywood values to the honorable tradition of figuring out why Wily Mo Pena can’t hit a curveball. For this you shall pay.

by Matt Taibbi

On the eve of the new NBA season, I have a proposal that will improve the lives of basketball fans everywhere. Actually not just basketball fans, but sports fans in general. And that is this: Round up 1 out of every 10 sportswriters and put them, as Stalin might have said, “to the wall.”

Not all sportswriters, mind you. Just a small percentage. Enough to prune the tree and send a message. I have a list already made up, but if anyone wants to put me on it, I won’t argue. Literature from Stalin’s Great Terror is full of accounts of arrestees who kicked and screamed all the way to the basement wall in the Lubyanka, but that won’t be me. I will go peaceably, like an honorable sportswriter, hot dog in one hand, bottle of Maalox in the other.

Why? That should be obvious to anyone who follows sports. My epiphany came this past July when I went to Las Vegas to cover the NBA Summer League. I’m under the basket in Cox Pavilion, big shiny credential around my neck, watching a Mavs-Pistons game and trying to figure out which player to bug with my idiotic questions once time runs out. The phalanx of mostly overweight sportswriters sitting around me are glancing nervously in the direction of the player benches, thinking the same thing.

At least two other guys I’d met were, like me, there to do stories on the Tim Donaghy refereeing scandal. We’re scanning the stands for NBA heavies to torture with Donaghy questions and perusing the summer rosters so that we can know the names of the poor young players we’ll be bothering for quotes on the scandal. At the end of the game I run over to corner a fresh-faced kid with a ponytail I’d seen sitting at the end of the bench.

“How would you assess your performance today?” I ask, just to make conversation.

He looks at me like I’m insane. “Well, I didn’t get in the game.”

“Right, of course. What do you think of Tim Donaghy?”

“Huh?”

“Do you notice any difference in the way they’re refereeing the games this year?”

He stares at me. “I wouldn’t know. This is my first year.”

He was Derrick Low, a onetime all–Pac 10 point guard, but I would go on to confuse him with Richie Frahm of Gonzaga, a name I’d seen on the roster. I figured the Gonzaga guy had to be the one with the ponytail. The interview ended on an awkward note when I asked him if he thought he could follow in the NBA footsteps of Gonzaga great John Stockton. “But I went to Washington State,” the kid said, backing toward the exit.

When I got back to the press section, a beat writer from one of the Atlantic Division teams leaned over. “Who was that? Did he give you anything?”

“What, you don’t recognize him? That’s Derrick Low, from Washington State. Great college player. Mad handle.”

The guy nodded. “Oh,” he said absently. “I thought it might be the guy from Gonzaga.”

Here’s the difference between a sportswriter asking inane questions and, say, a political correspondent doing the same thing: Sportswriters are significantly less cool than the people they write about. This is not always the case in an arena like politics. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with a politician. And I never feel guilty about any question I might want to ask one. Congressman! What did you steal this morning? Why, I resent that. I haven’t stolen anything. Empty your pockets! Well certainly [emptying pockets]. Now, you might think this looks like a set of silverware from the hotel where I ate breakfast, but I assure you…”

In sports it’s different. Seen from an up-close-and-personal perspective, athletes can be spoiled, egomaniacal Neanderthals, but from a distance they provide a genuine service, i.e., distracting us from our miserable lives. The average fan doesn’t need the verbose efforts of sportswriters to enjoy sports. He doesn’t need to see his heroes grilled about shit after the games. What were you thinking? Why didn’t you hit that fucking slider? Because he’s Frankie Rodriguez and nobody can hit his slider, that’s why.

I’m not sure what this line of questioning adds, but it’s at least defensible. Those panicky stories you see in your local sports section every morning, the ones where some beat guy acts like the free world as we know it will end if Rajon Rondo doesn’t learn to shoot a jumper, and he spends 950 words hounding the coaching staff and Rondo and Rondo’s teammates to make sure they grasp the gravity of this — that’s at least honest sportswriter work. It reflects the public’s completely understandable desire to worry incessantly about absurd trivia. We can all sympathize with that, and even players don’t seem to mind that much. Chad Pennington will answer politely when he gets asked for the 690th time if he thinks he has the arm strength to be effective in “the vertical game.” He knows that’s part of the deal. Real Jets fans worry about that shit. It makes sense.

The problem starts when media companies like ESPN and Fox Sports decide they’re not getting enough market share and start commissioning dial surveys to see how they can get viewers from High School Musical and Food Detectives to watch the Jags-Bolts game in week six, or the NBA draft. That’s when you start seeing halftime features about left fielder X and his wife taking pottery lessons together, or God-fearing, prone-to-weeping-on-camera retired defensive end Y repairing his relationship with his long-lost natural father, or Eastern European backup center Z going home every summer to [insert war-torn country here] to lift the spirits of displaced children with Down syndrome by helping them learn to play the drums.

Every time I see one of those stories on TV, I know some would-be Dick Ebersol is looking out his window and wondering why the three over-40 professional women he sees chatting over takeout salads on a bench in the park are not instead at home watching a hockey game on his network.

Here are some other inexplicably over-covered sports phenomena we can safely attribute to the aggressive intervention of marketing executives:

Brett Favre: Honestly, if I hear that fucker’s name one more time, I swear I’m going to drive a bus full of kids off a cliff. There must be numbers from some marketing genius somewhere that show that every time his face appears on TV, two more hicks in Arkansas buy bags of Cheetos and five more pill-popping trailer housewives decide to blow off making home lunches and spend their welfare checks feeding their kids at Applebee’s. I guess I understand it. Football skills aside, Favre is, wrapped in one package, everything that attracts the attention of the superfluous sports hack: an emotional story line about a deceased “hero” dad; an activist, cancer-surviving wife who likes the camera and who never hesitates to go on at length about her and her husband’s “awesome” relationship; an inspirational recovery from pill addiction; a willingness to go on air with Greta Van Susteren; and a seemingly endless, once-a-year, will-he-or-won’t-he retirement controversy. Favre is also a half-literate white southerner who played in the northern Midwest (from a marketing point of view, he’s like both halves of a presidential ticket), giving him natural appeal to all the key demographics. As much as I can’t stand Favre, I’m hoping he outlives me, because the Tim Russert effect after his death would be overwhelming.

The WNBA: The really hilarious thing about this plummeting Titanic is how the assholes who dreamed it up have now come full circle. When they failed to lure the expected millions of sophisticated female viewers with an on-court product of shitty, station-to-station basketball played to empty stadiums, they resorted to tarting up their athletes. The league recently held orientations to teach WNBA players to look more “feminine,” showing them how to “arc their eyebrows, apply strokes of blush across their cheekbones, and put on no-smudge eyeliner.” By implying that the league can’t survive on its on-court product alone and forcing women to assume “traditional” feminine roles, they’re pissing off their target demographic: women who don’t have much use for “traditional” roles. In an amusing twist, they did this right about the time the actual games were receiving attention, following the impressive Detroit-L.A. chick brawl. (How disappointed the league must have been that the court was not made of mineral-enriched Dead Sea mud.) Anyway, there are too many reporters engaged in selling this stuff to us; death to them.

A-Rod: He’s from New York, he’s the best baseball player in the world, and I guess he fucked Madonna. So already you won’t be able to avoid hearing about him. There are probably camel herders in Kazakhstan who’ve heard the whole story by now. The problem with A-Rod is that he’s the worst of all possible worlds, a confluence of supreme athletic excellence with insatiable narcissism and an agent who would interrupt the Gettysburg Address to announce that his client was exercising his opt-out. We’re talking about a guy who announced that he was signing a deal with William Morris to “broaden the scope” of his celebrity at a time when even Kalahari Bushmen were getting tired of hearing about the Cynthia–Madonna–A-Rod–Lenny Kravitz love rhombus. If he couldn’t play baseball, A-Rod would still find some grasping, desperate way to become famous. He’d be Kevin Federline or that asshole who married Tori Spelling. But he can play baseball. So we’re stuck with him.

Stuck with him, that is, until we execute a sufficient number of us sportswriters. In general, sports coverage is entertaining, useful, and competent. The problem is that there’s too much of it, and it’s too loud. When sportswriters aren’t pimping asinine story lines, they’re writing hysterical screeds about steroids or greenies or gambling, like they’re real problems in the scheme of things. The root issue is not enough games. When there aren’t enough games to keep all the sportswriters busy, suddenly you’re picking up the paper in the morning to see a yammering loudmouth like Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times screaming “An Ethical and Moral Disaster!” about the Donaghy scandal. Not just an ethical disaster, mind you, and not just a moral disaster — an ethical and a moral disaster.

In fact the real disaster here is Jay Mariotti isn’t busy enough. And I think that problem can be solved easily. There are logs to be chopped in Siberia, canals in malarial zones that need digging. I’ll be happy to join him. The games will go on, same as before. There’ll just be less noise and fewer people stalking the players after the fourth quarter.

This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.