Talk about a no-win situation.
As you may have heard by now, Mo Williams was the subject of a what has become a controversial article by Yahoo! Sports’s Marc J. Spears. In it, Mo describes being so depressed and confused by LeBron’s departure that this summer he honestly considered retiring from basketball. At age 27. With 3 years and $26.3MM left on his current contract.
Since the article came out, Mo has been the subject of more attention—and more ridicule—than I expected. So much so that he felt compelled today to declare that he had been misquoted and taken out of context by Spears. In short, Mo decided he needed to call Spears a liar to try to regain some level of respect.
In my opinion, this is a really unfortunate turn for everyone who cares about sports and what’s happening in the minds of the people who play and coach them.
Today all athletes—even those at the college level (and in some cases I’m sure, the high school level)—take media training. The main objective is to scrub their potential interview responses of anything that could be seen as offensive or ignorant.
I understand this, especially in light of the unprecedented reach of new media. Nobody wants to look or sound like a jackass when there are contracts and endorsements at stake. Even if it ends up robbing us of interview like this, one of my favorite of all time.
Do I like losing them? Absolutely not. Do I understand the logic? Definitely.
However, the public reaction to Mo reveals that there’s also a more unfortunate side to this practice. Mo is being crucified for allowing himself to be honest while in the public eye. But his honesty didn’t involve bigotry, ignorance, vulgarity, arrogance, or immaturity. In fact, the Spears interview showed that he has a thoughtfulness, a self-awareness, a mental and emotional depth that most of us never knew or (likely) expected.
In a word, Mo became interesting and relatable.
For granting the public this look inside his head, he was treated like an outcast on an elementary school playground.
You can bet that every pro basketball, football, and baseball player (since, let’s be honest, those are the only sports that are going to get enough run for this to matter) has taken notice—and then declared, “Man, I gotta make sure not to do what THAT guy did.”
In short, it’s going to be a rarer and rarer occurrence to hear an athlete say anything beyond the pre-scripted talking points we’re all so tired of hearing.
“No, this game isn’t more meaningful to us. We just wanted to get a win.”
“I don’t worry about that kind of thing. I just focus on knowing the game plan, going out and executing.”
“We know they’re a great team, but we believe in ourselves and know that if we work hard and play as a team we’ll be all right.”
Blah.
Blah.
Blah.
Good thing “the fans” and the pundits have been so hard on Mo.
There’s a great irony in all of this: namely, as the average person’s access to pro athletes and coaches continues to increase via 24/7 sports coverage, Twitter, blogs, etc., there will be less and less actual content of interest out there to find. Press conferences and interviews will be the equivalent of those stuffed animals that randomly spew one of a set number of phrases every time you pull a string.
In many cases, we’re already there.
So even if it makes me look like some kind of pussy, I wish Mo had stood by his comments. More importantly, I wish the reaction to those comments hadn’t been so negative.
Most of all, I hope that a few months from now, when everyone starts complaining again about what hollow role models pro athletes are, how all they do is talk about contracts and championships, how—with a precious few exceptions—every interview is basically the same, I wish everyone would look back at this Mo Williams incident and realize exactly why we’ve reached that point.
There’s a lot of blame to go around. But I for one can point almost none of it at the athletes themselves. And more than any emotions Mo expressed, THAT is the saddest thing about this entire incident.
-T
