The Sports Cliche Problem
I have something important that I want to say to all sports reporters who find themselves in the position of interviewing professional athletes. Not athletes in any particular league, but all professional athletes in general. This statement also goes out to all consumers of sports media in the hopes that they will demand more from the field reporters who do such interviews with such athletes. The message is simple and direct, and desperately needs to be said: please, for the love of all that is good in the world, stop asking stupid and obvious questions to athletes in your interviews.
All sports fans are well acquainted with my premise. How many times have we been watching a pregame interview and have seen a reporter ask an athlete blandly "Do you think you can win the game today," or some such variation of that insipid question ("what do you think of your chances" is also a time-honored yet equally stupid form of the question.) Does anyone, including the reporter, expect an answer from the athlete other than "Yes" or "I like our chances"? Do sports reporters continually ask this banal question in the hopes that someday, somewhere a professional athlete will say "No, no I don't think we can win today. I think we will get crushed like a paper cup. But we are going out there anyway for the money." While it would be vastly entertaining to hear this said by an athlete, we all know it's never going to happen. So why even ask this question at all?
Perhaps my criticism seems a little unfair. After all, sports journalism is one of the few areas of professional life where one can not only get away with stale cliches in writing, but in fact the artform revels in tired, old cliches (perhaps because sports lingo itself is fraught with so many cliches, and I don't need to remind you readers of all the sports cliches out there, you know them well.) Don't believe me? Watch "Around the Horn" on ESPN and turn it into a drinking game. Every time you hear "this/here is a guy...." or "this/here is a team...." take a drink. I guarantee you'll be slightly buzzed or slightly hammered by the end of the show (if Woody is on the show that day, you may need to call an ambulance beforehand.)
Postgame interview questions are typically just as stupid as pregame interview questions are. One needs only to reflect back to the recent interview following the Diamondbacks winning the NLCS. You probably know immediately which question I am referring to. In the midst of that teams most thrilling moment in life, the reporter asks how they did what they just did (referring to winning 21 of 22 straight games to get to the World Series) to which the reply was "I don't know." Brilliant. The irony of course is the reporter saw what they just did. Perhaps if the reporter were blind, the question would have been a fair and cogent one. Considering he had the gift of vision intact, one wonders how he didn't know the answer to his own question. Perhaps even more startling is that the player couldn't come up with an answer after having lived the experience. But, I do not intend to hold athletes accountable for these ridiculously cliched and stupid exchanges. After all, ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. On top of that, reporters are supposed to be the wordsmiths, and as such should be held to a higher standards. I don't expect a sportswriter to hit a 3-run homer in the ninth to win a game, and similarly I don't expect athletes to be Shakespeares.
Perhaps there is no positive change to be had here. Perhaps there just isn't anything original to be asked in an on-the-spot, in-the-moment sports interview. But if this is the case, then what exactly is the point of doing these exchanges in the first place? The only time they are memorable is when something completely insane happens, like when Leaf attacked Jay Posner or when Namath tried to kiss Kolber. Perhaps for the possibility of these kinds of surreal and highly entertaining moments alone the current paradigm needs to be kept in place, and reporters need to keep plugging away with the same tired, one-possible-response questions.
