"Say What?" A note about athletes and verbal skills

Not even worthy of a rant…just a comment about the sad state of some sports stars and their inability to put together an understandable sentence. I ran across this gem from new San Diego Chargers starting quarterback Philip Rivers, in an article talking about his team’s chances of making the postseason:

I know there are much worse examples in the post-Yogi Berra era, but this just struck a nerve for some reason. Oh well.

Mundane? Check!
Pointless? Check!

Oh, I don’t know. It sounds like an off-the-cuff answer to a stupid question that’s been asked a million times already. I almost see this as more an indictment of the questioner, that he/she can’t think of anything to ask that’ll elicit a compelling answer. Particularly with the NFL, the coverage is so intense that it doesn’t take long before both questioner and questionee run out of things to say. It’s a darn good thing that the season is starting is all I can say.

Superfly Jimmy Snuka gives his opinion to Andy Richter on the (1996?) election:

*"You know, brudda, the most beautiful thing about this whole thing is
that you meet all these beautiful people, but when the times do come,
when the election comes, it will only make it more better still, for
everybody that’s here, for all of us that’s want to know what’s going
on. The most beautiful thing for me is that I love it, and I’m enjoying
it, and that’s why I’m here, for people like this, for you and the people
out there in TV land, the greatest thing of all time, the first time.
We’re all involved in it. It mixes all together. It takes this to make
this: Jimmy Snuka, the greatest man in the world; and Andy Richter.

Alright.*

(I actually have this on tape, but I found this transcript on the net.)

You’re reading a transcript of a verbal conversation. That is what they almost all sound like. Read a transcript of a TV talk show between a reporter and a politician. They look just the same.

If you transcribed everyday conversations between two random people, it’d look the same as the one you quoted.

We all deal in clichés. Unless we’re some kind of literary hothouse rose whose world is made up of nothing but language and ideas, we all deal in clichés. There’s a reason: because they are simple, direct and they work.

Sports is about mass appeal. It’s about action over talk. It couldn’t live without its clichés, and people who think in them.

It doesn’t surprise me or disappoint me that there would be a lot of people who might not be the best at expressing themselves verbally, especially those who are highly concentrated on achieving excellence in a non-verbal field.

What does surprise and disappoint me is that regardless of this reality, anyone cares about it enough to go to the trouble of recording or viewing/reading such statements. I mean, really, what purpose does the general sports interview serve? It doesn’t inform. It doesn’t entertain, except to the extent that the subject makes a fool of himself or herself.

If I was king, I’d make it illegal to interview athletes and coaches. Who cares what they have to say anyway? It’s their performance that counts.

Beisbol been berra, berra good to me.

It’s expected. It doesn’t have to have a purpose. Or the purpose is to establish that the athlete is a normal, open guy and will talk to the press.

The rest - including the content - is ritual. Take the ritual out of sports and you might as well pack up and go home.

Expected by whom? And why? Would your life be so much the poorer if “We have to win one game at a time” was taken away from you? There’s still quite a bit left, including the hours of meaningless commentary by experts, the sports-based advertising, the uniforms, bands, cheerleaders, tailgate parties.

Well, who’s talking about taking all ritual out of sports. Surely, some of it is severable? What would you miss if we took away the ritual of an athlete making contentless statements?

Me? Not a damn thing. But this is a business, and those athletes are properties that have to be marketed and maximized. And that’s not going to happen by barring them from contact with the media.

Former NY Yankees outfielder Luis Polonia, on The Boss:

[paraphrased]

“George Steinbrenner only cares about one thing. And I don’t know what that is.”

Ex Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann, now a color commentatot for ESPN:

“Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”

Some football coach:
“I want you all to line up alphabetically by height.”

Shaq, in his Orlando days:
“I’ve won at every level, except college and the pros.”

Some golfer:
“No other sport has as good a relationship between player and caddie as golf does.”

(All from memory, so these might not be exactly right.)

From Bull Durham:

Crash Davis: It’s time to work on your interviews.
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: My interviews? What do I gotta do?
Crash Davis: You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. They’re your friends. Write this down: “We gotta play it one day at a time.”
Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: Got to play… it’s pretty boring.
Crash Davis: 'Course it’s boring, that’s the point. Write it down.

I forgot one.

A football coach:
“Listen, everyone in this organization is completely focused in on preparing for this week’s game against the Giants. I mean against the Raiders.”

Agree, the only thing more pointless than asking an athlete about sports, is asking an athlete about something besides sports. Why anyone would care what
Joe Shlabotnik or whoever thinks about terrorism or gas prices is beyond me.

The most stunning thing about Rivers’s comment is that he only said the word “football” once. Football players and coaches always makes a point of mentioning the word ad nauseum in every sentence they say:

“If this football team wants to win this football game, they’ve got to start moving the football down the football field.”

It’s like they’re so goddamn stupid they’ve got to keep reminding themselves what it is they’re talking about. Athletes in other sports don’t seem to do this.

My all-time favorite, from Dan Dierdorf while commentating on an NFL game:

“Well folks, stranger things have happened, but none stranger than this.”

:smack:

And the famous Oil Can Boyd quote, upon being asked to comment on the game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium being cancelled due to fog:

“That’s what they get for building a ballpark on the ocean.”

You gotta give Oil Can +10 points for meteorological insight, ie, understanding the relationship between fog and water.

But then you have to subtract -8 points for geographical cluelessness. But I still put him in the plus column, net.

But sometimes sports figures can rise above the cliches.

Marv Levy was once asked if an upcoming game was a “must win”. He answered, “World War Two was a ‘must win’. This is just a football game.”

Jason Kidd: We have to turn this team around 360 degrees.