About fifteen minutes from now, my Giants will take the field against the Redskins. The Giants are coming off a bye week (in which they somehow managed to trail by 10 going into the fourth quarter), so the big story leading up to the game has to do with the always-volatile Jeremy Shockey, who popped off after a bad loss at Seattle, and said the team was outcoached.
This has led to a lot of hand-wringing about whether the team is in crisis, or whether Tom Coughlin should bench Shockey, and the sports pundits have had a field day analyzing every aspect of the story. The consensus seems to be that Shockey is a Bad Person for running down his coach in the media.
Of course, that sort of misses the real source of the problem: If there hadn’t been a camera crew in the locker room after the game, he wouldn’t’ve had the chance to pop off. If ESPN and Fox and CBS and the rest of the sports media hadn’t played the clip 10,000 times, it wouldn’t’ve been a problem.
Much as I enjoy some of these shows– Pardon the Interruption in particular– there’s a level of hypocrisy in sports punditry that I find really distasteful. We’ve created a situation where athletes are played vast sums of money, and placed under huge pressure to win games, and expected to live and die with every play. And yet, when they get emotionally involved in the outcome and vent after the game, it becomes a huge issue, and they get berated for being poor sports.
Now, Shockey isn’t blameless– only the presence of Plaxico Burress keeps him from being the biggest knucklehead in a New York uniform– but there’s an easy solution to the problem of players saying stupid things immediately after the game: Don’t interview them immediately after the game. Keep the camera crews outside, and give them a chance to cool off. And if they still pop off, cut them some slack. When a player says “Write that down,” don’t– he’s just venting, and whatever he just said isn’t worth repeating.
If you’re going to have millions of dollars riding on the outcome of a football game, the people playing the game are going to get a little wrapped up in the whole thing. What Shockey said was actually milder than what most Giants fans were saying in bars and living rooms all over the country at that same moment. The only difference was that somebody got him on tape, and put it on tv.
Have you considered the possibility that most of these “controversies” are about as real as the “conflicts” between contestants on reality TV shows?
No, the only difference is that Shockey works for the guy, and all the fans in bars don’t. Telling reporters not to cover it when players say stupid things isn’t exactly a likely happening.