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| Marshawn Lynch at Media Day for Super Bowl XLIX - Courtesy of CNN.com |
By: Tim Durr
The media and Marshawn Lynch have been in a battle over him answering questions for over a calendar year. He has stood there silently, repeated one phrase 29 times, and largely spat in the face of the media and the NFL's attempts to force him to talk to them.
Today, Marshawn Lynch finally uttered more than six or seven words over and over again. And, what he did say was a checkmate to the culture that sports journalism now operates under.
After a diatribe toward the media, Marshawn simply ended the statement claiming that the media must be mad at him. If they weren't, why else would they be there asking him the same question over and over?
Initially, I was mad at him. How hard it is to answer some simple questions. Then, I thought...what would he say? It surely would be a canned answer that simply said all he wants to do is focus on football. With Marshawn Lynch, that's probably the truest answer, though.
Before today, my thought was to set up a standoff with him. Get him in the media room and stare at him without saying anything. Wait him out until he asked what everyone was doing to try to flip it on him and get a response. That changed when he spoke today.
His response about not understanding what the media is trying to get from him was eye-opening.
"And for some reason, y'all continue to come back and do the same thing that y'all did," Lynch said to the media Thursday in his opening statements. "I don't know what kind of story y'all are trying to get out of me. I don't know what kind of image y'all are trying to portray of me. But it don't matter what y'all think."
Those words bring up the point of where we are in media and what we are looking for. When asking good questions, we expect to receive good answers. We take classes and learn techniques of how to evoke the most emotion and information out of sources - when done correctly, a beautiful story can be told. We're far from that in most press conferences today, though. I hear so many poorly worded questions or statements with an inflection hoping for an answer.
The media is outnumbered 4-to-1 by public relations personnel who train and groom athletes to answer with canned information that says little. The coaches preach to players what to give away and what not to say, and it leads to a world of double-thinking athletes who carefully sculpt every sentence because they don't want to get yelled at for saying "bulletin board" material.
If Marshawn Lynch doesn't have anything unique, thoughtful, or evocative to say to the media, then we don't need to talk to him. He doesn't want to open up and talk to us and if he did then he alluded that all he would say was the same canned information that everyone else gives.
"I'm here preparing for a game and y'all want to ask me all these questions." Lynch continued as reporters yelled out questions. "Which is understandable, I could get down with that. But, I told y'all, I'm not about to say nothing."
That is where we're at with so much of our media today. It's a battle for someone to say something, which is actually nothing. As a journalist, you need to have sources in your article. You need soundbites for your newscast, you need a character for your story. The PR department of the NFL team doesn't want anyone to be cast in a negative light so you hear the same boring, repetitive comments about wanting to win, focusing on the task at hand, and the "I'm only concerned with playing team X on Sunday."
None of those add depth or shed light on aspects of the game. It doesn't give us a deeper understanding of who the person is. We don't get to see what is truly going on with the team, player, or organization. It has become more and more scarce to hear great quotes in a press conference before or after a game. Is that the fault of the journalists? Partially. It's more so an attribution to the amount of time and money paid to media relations employees to sculpt players into robots who only say the best possible answer when being interviewed.
Marshawn Lynch showed us what is wrong with the relationship between media and athletes today. It isn't authentic. There isn't an attempt by the media to gain information, to...you know...inform readers. There is a pursuit of click-bait, cheap headlines, and fake or overblown controversies. It's a response to the sheltered athletes who give canned responses. It's the result of hearing the same boring quotes and when someone finally gives a unique answer, it is blown up into a controversy or a "you won't believe Tom Brady's response when asked..." It's bush league and cheap.
The media relations of professional sports teams and reporters at-large, are fighting a war with the wrong weapons and heading in the wrong directions. The attempts from most are to piss each other off. The attempt should be to work together. It should be to help the media accurately tell the story of your franchise without threatening credentials or withholding players from speaking. The response by the media should be to accurately report stories and search for interesting information to give readers, both good and bad.
The excessive coverage of Marshawn Lynch not saying anything and of the controversy in New England with footballs being improperly inflated has ruined my excitement for Super Bowl XLIX. I'm tired of every athlete on every show being asked about both topics. I'm tired of headlines and articles being written solely on the response of some ex-athlete to some other ex-athlete.
If this is the business that journalists and media professionals live in and deal with...then I don't want to be a part of the circus. A statement of advice - ask questions that are thoughtful and open-ended. Frame them well and don't ask questions that are double-barreled, leading, or long winded. If we start there and stop trying to get a soundbite to paint someone red-handed, then maybe the other side will start to back off their restraints and excessive coaching to allow players to give real insight.
Even with all of that, they still might tell you, "I'm not about to say nothing."
