The interview hunt: Waiting and wondering in the media game
For you it may mean Valentine’s Day, and the old barely-veiled pagan rituals of renewal and rebirth, the thirsty earth seeking the blood soaking down into it for seed and regeneration to take root once again.
If it does, try to keep the blood off your good shoes and enjoy yourself. For me, and others like me, it means the great dance begins again.
The interview hunt.
The hours of looking at one’s phone. The agonies of wondering whether to send another text. The pain of silence from a mobile’s screen. The unbearable angst, the wondering if, given the lack of responses, you actually exist at all; if a text doesn’t land on your phone, does anyone believe you’re there?
Umberto Eco, cited elsewhere in this column, would surely have rustled up a 100 page essay on the erotics of the journalist’s hunt for an interview subject, the journalist in the role of infatuated teenager, the subject playing the role of the high school football star, and in some cases, not even playing a role so much as the actuality.
You organise the chat through a third party, usually someone involved with the team. This person can be a press officer, a member of the management team, or an office-holder of another sort.
No matter their official designation, here they play the role of your slightly cheekier pal asking the (distant) objection of your affection what your chances are.
Once you get the number of the player, you send off your first text. And wait.
And wait.
When sports hacks huddle in their twos and threes the horror stories are aired.
The player who showed the text in the dressing room, to general amusement; the player who’d given away that phone and had moved on, you know, to another phone because, look, there were too many people using that old number, OK?
Or what about the player who texted back that he was grand to talk, sure not a bother, but could it wait until after the season?
Those are the good stories, by the way, because you know what actually happened to your messages. The FBI itself would do well to establish what’s happened to some of those polite overtures, and where they ended up.
The funny thing is that all you want as a journalist is certainty: a player can’t talk? Tell us. Nobody’s going to cry, we can all move on with our lives. The strangest aspect of this, if you take a step back from it, is that some of the most indecisive people you’ll encounter by text or mail tend to be people who make instantaneous decisions in the heat of the action. Or maybe it’s not strange at all; maybe that’s what the instantaneous-decision portions of their brains are reserved for.
When you can get past your own immediate problems you have to spare a thought too for those trying to facilitate these discussions. In professional sports a gatekeeper is formally appointed, someone whose job it is to manage the intersection of media and player, and many of these folk face their own long dark night of the soul on a regular basis. To take a hypothetical example, how would you handle a situation in which one of your players bounced a ball off the head of a pregnant lady standing on the sideline as your team trains?
With many an eye-roll and a noisy exhalation, presumably.
Everyone can move on to their coffee and croissant, as I am not about to make another plea for player-media co-operation for the good of humanity.
I can’t do that now. I’m waiting for a text.
Winning own ball vital for hurlers
Yours truly was in Páirc Uí Rinn on Saturday night, when a hard game turned spicy in the closing ten minutes. Cork were well adrift but a late goal made for an exciting finish, though Waterford were the better team over the 70.
What was obvious from that game and last week’s, Cork-Galway in Salthill, was the sheer importance of the ball-winning forward in hurling. You could create some class of an index which would rank the All-Ireland contenders directly on that basis, linking their chances of ultimate success in September to the number of attackers who are able to win their own ball.
Take a look at your own preferred outfit and you’ll see that this is not quite the general skill you might think it to be. Look at the team that has been winning All-Irelands for fun these many years, and you’ll see that it’s a prerequisite rather than a luxury.
In the name of the game
As referred to in the main piece on the page, Umberto Eco, the Italian academic and writer died over the weekend at the age of 84. Eco was a well-regarded essayist and semiotician until he published a novel over 30 years ago, The Name of the Rose, which became a surprise international bestseller.
Eco wrote a lengthy essay on how soccer convinced him there was no God, but I couldn’t find that over the weekend. I did find his essay From Play To Carnival, however, in which he traces the contamination of politics and religion by what he calls “the Carnival”, the focus on spectacle and play which deflects attention from substance.
“Sport too has been Carnivalised,” he wrotes. “How? . . . By becoming not the interlude it was meant to be (one soccer match a week, and the Olympics only every so often) but by an all-pervasive presence; by becoming not an activity for its own ends but a commercial enterprise.
“The game played doesn’t matter anymore (a game moreover, that has been formed into an immensely difficult task that requires the taking of performance-enhancing drugs) but the grand Carnival of the before, during and after,in which the viewers, not the players themselves, play all week long.”
Given Ger Hartmann’s comments here on Saturday, worth considering.
Messi a fan of the men from the capital
Travelled to Dublin last week. Got a taxi.
The driver was a very nice man who told me that Lionel Messi is a Dublin football fan.
More than that: a judge of the Sky Blues’ teamwork.
This gent told me he travels to Barcelona quite often and met Messi there a couple of years ago; the Argentinian noted the man’s Dublin GAA top and praised Paul Flynn and Diarmuid Connolly’s skill, Eoghan O’Gara’s heart — and stressed Bernard Brogan’s need to get more involved with his teammates and not to play a solo role.
Between the grant from Croke Park and Messi’s backing, who can stop them?
