Why a lot of professional athletes don’t like reporters

After the Miami Heat eliminated the Milwaukee Bucks from the NBA playoffs – which was a Very Big Deal because the Heat barely made it into the playoffs and the Bucks were one of the favorites – a reporter asked Giannis Antetokounmpo if he considered the Bucks season a failure.

Giannis (and I’m about 56% sure I spelled “Antetokounmpo” right the first time and I’m not going to attempt it again) said “Oh My God” and “You asked me the same question last year” and then proceeded to deliver one of the most polite and well-mannered “fuck you” answers in the history of sports journalism.

Just in case you didn’t watch the video:

Giannis wanted to know if the reporter got a promotion every year and if he didn’t, did the reporter consider the year a failure? Giannis also pointed out Michael Jordan won six championships, but played 15 years, so were the other nine years failures?

The Giannis interview is a good example of why a lot of professional athletes don’t like most reporters and way up there on that list is the tendency to look for a scapegoat and label anyone that doesn’t win a championship a loser and a failure.

For example:

The morning after the Kansas City Royals won the World Series against the New York Mets, I was walking through LaGuardia Airport and saw a giant headline on a New York tabloid paper that labeled the Mets an: “Amazin’ Disgrace.”

In 2015 the Mets won 90 games in the regular season, beat the Dodgers 3-2 in the Division Series, beat the Cubs 4-0 in the National League Championship Series, but because they didn’t win it all they were called a disgrace.

News flash:

It’s entirely possible to have a good year and not win a championship, or play well and lose because someone else played better or play poorly and win because someone else played worse, but being reasonable doesn’t sell newspapers or get people to tune into sports talk radio or yell at their TV sets.

Outrage sells, so sports journalists tend to offer a lot of it.

So that’s the first reason a lot of pro athletes don’t like most reporters, but it’s definitely not the only reason. (BTW: there are exceptions to everything I’m about to say, but generally speaking, they are exceptions.)

They don’t trust us

Most players don’t trust most reporters and I understand why.  

When the Royals went to the World Series the national reporters showed up and national reporters might not know all that much about any one team because they haven’t been following them closely, so it’s not uncommon for national reporters to read local reporters’ stuff in an effort to catch up.

I had two ESPN reporters tell me they used my stuff all the time and assumed I would find that flattering.

And I might have found it flattering if they managed to mention my name and give me credit, but since they didn’t it was kind of like someone saying: “Hey, I’ve been banging your wife…you must be very proud that I find her so attractive.”

On more than one occasion I had other reporters try to listen in on a conversation I was having with a player or use something I wrote or said without attribution and I learned to keep my mouth shut (really not one of my best things) around other reporters because I didn’t want to see my stuff under somebody else’s byline or come out of some TV guy’s mouth.

On one very memorable occasion a player informed me that the reporter behind me had turned on a digital recorder and put it in his shirt pocket and was trying to record our conversation, but the player saw the digital recorder’s light on, so he started spewing out clichés for the benefit of our eavesdropper.

They say there’s honor among thieves, but forgot to add: “Unless the thief is working on deadline.”

OK, so most players don’t trust most reporters and I don’t blame them; what else?

They think we’re non-athletes

Having a reporter who’s 100 pounds overweight or looks like he can’t lift anything heavier than a Quarter-Pounder criticize a professional ballplayer’s athletic abilities might irk that professional ballplayer and I only said “might” to cover my bases.

True story.

We got a soft-serve ice cream machine in the press box and used it so much we broke it almost immediately, but by the time the machine folded under pressure reporters were used to having ice cream in the press box so they gave us buckets of it, but then we complained that we actually had to scoop our own ice cream.

When I told that story to Jason Kendall he immediately made me repeat it to a third party and prefaced my story with: “You’re not going to believe this shit.”

When Ben Zobrist overheard two reporters discussing improvements in the press box since the Royals started winning (things were looking up, we not only got a soft-serve ice cream machine, we also got a machine that squirted out melted cheese for our nachos) Ben turned around and said: “Anything else we can do for you guys?”

Kendall also warned me that if I wanted to be taken even semi-seriously by players: “Don’t get fat.”

They think we “connive”

In order to meet deadlines reporters often have to start writing before a game is over and if a story is nearly finished and just needs a few post-game quotes, the reporter doesn’t want one of those post-game quotes to screw up his story.

And one day a reporter had prematurely theorized that the heat had affected the players’ performances.

I heard him ask three different people (one manager, two players) how the heat had affected the game and all three said it didn’t: baseball is played during the summer and they were pretty much used to it. Which didn’t help his story and last time I saw the reporter he was still trying to find someone to give him the quote he needed.  

When a reporter wants a player to say something and the player doesn’t say it, the reporter might ask the same question again, but word it differently. A reporting trick that inspired one player to say: “I hate it when reporters connive.”

They think we’re clueless

If you watch post-game interviews, most of the questions are horrible: “how does it feel” or “take me through that” or “what does it say about this team” type questions and I’m pretty sure the Collective Bargaining Agreement requires players to respond to bad questions with a limited selection of sports clichés.

Which players might not do if we asked them about double teams or help defense or pitch patterns in fastball counts – which to be fair, some reporters do, but they’re definitely the exceptions – so our bad questions make players think we don’t know much about their sport, which all too often is uncomfortably accurate.

After the Royals had just won a series in St. Louis, the Cardinals came to play in KC and their fans came along with them, so a somewhat clueless TV reporter asked a Royals player if it was “hard to play with all that red in the stands.” 

Players do not give a damn what fans are wearing, but the player gave a polite answer anyway. After she walked away, another player who’d been listening to the exchange, said: “Pretty fuckin’ red in St. Louis.”

They think we’re slobs

It’s not 100% of pro athletes, but most of them are fussy about their appearance (just check out NBA players arriving for games) and if a rookie shows up dressed like he’s getting ready to mow his lawn with a haircut he got at Benihana, some veteran might tell him he needs to step up his fashion game because this is the Big Leagues.

The on-camera TV people dress better, but the off-camera people, radio and print reporters tend to show up in whatever they find most comfortable, so you see a lot of cargo shorts and worn out sneakers and golf shirts that may or may not have soft-serve ice cream stains on them, attire which makes players shake their heads and think we clearly have no self-respect and need to do some shopping and while we’re at it, maybe lose 50 pounds.

They think we’re rude

As previously mentioned, once a team gets to the postseason hordes of national reporters show up which means there are way too many reporters and not nearly enough athletes willing to talk (they hide out in the off-limits areas like the training room or dining room) so reporters get desperate for an interview.

After a postseason win I was having a conversation with Wade Davis (and the only way to get worthwhile information is one-on-one) and a desperate TV reporter walked up and without saying a word stuck a microphone in-between us while his camera man filmed our private conversation and in retrospect, I really wish I’d worked a few F-bombs into the exchange to make sure the TV guys couldn’t use the video.

A whole bunch of reporters think rude behavior is OK in an effort to “get the story” which is yet another reason the public holds us in such high regard.

And I screwed up, too

When I first showed up to cover the Royals I made a lot of mistakes and did some dumb stuff and if I’m being totally honest (enjoy it because it might not happen again for a while) some players didn’t like me simply because I was part of the media and some didn’t like me because I was too friendly with certain players and coaches and some didn’t like me because they thought I spent too much time in the clubhouse.

(Players consider the clubhouse their home and think reporters should limit how much time they spend inside somebody else’s home and a lot of players would be happy if we never got to go inside.)

But I had actually tried playing baseball (I wasn’t very good) which gave me an appreciation of how difficult it is and also made me appreciate there were learnable skills involved and a right way to do things. That being the case, I was more fascinated by the “process” (how and why players did what they did) than the “results” (the numbers the process produced).

The players I got along with appreciated that approach and during our conversations let me know what they didn’t like about the media.

And guys they considered untrustworthy, rude, poorly dressed, clueless, overweight, conniving non-athletes calling them “failures” is on the list.