TIPPING POINT:In a world where sports people specialise in cant, it was refreshing to hear Alex Ferguson actually say something worth hearing
IT'S NEARLY a decade now since a memorably awful Late Late Showwhere then-host Pat Kenny was one side of a triangular chat tournament so tedious it had the audience looking around for things high enough to jump off. And it wasn't even Kenny's fault. For once he was the victim: of an interminably banal rally between Monica Seles and Jennifer Capriati.
The tennis champs were on the show plugging a tournament in the RDS and clearly would have preferred to have been almost anywhere else. Pat tried his best.
“You are emotionally vulnerable on court, but the last thing you expected was for some maniac to stab you?” he said to Seles, referring to the infamous knife attack.
To which she replied: “Question?”
There isn’t a hack in the world who hasn’t been there: the stage where it doesn’t matter what you say or do, the interviewee is just taunting you with their lack of interest, retreating into the trite comfort of cliché. Sports figures are brilliant at it. They can make Michael Lowry sound like Peter Ustinov.
“What about the youngsters out to beat you?” Pat persisted.
“I just try and stay in shape and go out there and have some fun,” was the reply.
“You spend most of your life in hotels, don’t you?” he ploughed on, gamely, playing the woe-is-me card.
“I just try and stay in shape and go out there and have some fun,” came zinging back at him.
“What’s left for you, Monica?”
“I don’t know. Erm, I just try and stay in shape and go out there and have some fun.”
So when that little brouhaha blew up last week over Fergie going all seethy at a pre-Champions League final press-conference, like a Govan Krakatoa, giving that “you’ll keep” glare to a reporter who lobbed a gentle if loaded question about Ryan Giggs, it is important to remember the alternative.
Ferguson actually provided that alternative – “All the players are important: everyone of them.” But the microphones then picked up the muttered aside: “We’ll get him. We’ll ban him on Friday.”
All of which kind of puts paid to the notion that the Manchester United manager is some kind of media maestro, a Glasgow Goebbels.
And thank God for it.
In the midst of a sporting world where access is king and a microphone is encouraged to be thrust under noses milliseconds after the finish-line or final whistle, it is easy to see why athletes retreat into cant. Sometimes it is all that’s left, and a ravenous media laps it up.
Far too many, though, have become much too fluent in the vernacular of saying damn all for a long time. Like Monica, they turn up, wag the chin and are about as illuminating as a Benghazi bunker.
But there is something wonderfully and defiantly old-fashioned about Ferguson’s open disdain for reporters. It testifies to an understanding of how the media game works, but also to an unwillingness to play along that actually increases his credibility.
Certainly anyone who thinks the hack who got on the Manchester United manager’s wick was affronted by such behaviour is wet behind the ears. I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of poo that he left that conference like a chien avec deux mickeys: proud and happy to have provoked any kind of reaction beyond the banal.
You see, authenticity is a funny thing, but the public do twig it. They realise when they’re being pandered to, and when they’re not.
For half a century Lester Piggott treated the press like something he’d trod on after getting off his horse. A year after winning the Washington International on Sir Ivor, and getting criticised by some American journalists for the ride, he returned to Laurel Park to win the same race on Karabas. Asked afterwards by those same reporters when he felt he had the race won, he replied simply “two weeks ago” and kept walking.
Yet despite clearly not giving a fiddler’s for what anyone thinks about him, and even after a stretch in the clink borne out of a legendary meanness, Old Stoneface remains an immensely popular figure. His old rival Willie Carson once moaned that he spoke to the press much more and yet was never accorded the reverential coverage Piggott provoked. The fact that bugged the Scot is explanation enough.
All of which is not to suggest that media types are punishment freaks just aching to be hanging from the heels in some sadomasochistic cellar. We don’t even demand to be taken remotely as seriously as Alex Ferguson seems to think is necessary. But that authentic vibe is important, and ultimately the public loses out when bombarded with the alternative: hours and acres of glib, PR-schooled, sound-bite nuggets of inanity: just think Alan Pardew.
The Newcastle manager could actually come here on a media-management course this summer when damn near every GAA worthy, from county manager to county board Gael, will give a masterclass, doing themselves a mischief trying to come out with the most anodyne dross, all in an attempt to not provide the opposition with something to pin up on a dressingroom wall.
Antrim manager Liam Bradley apparently came out recently and described a rival’s football style as “puke”, a not unreasonable assertion given the yawn-inducing match that followed. Bradley’s comments were treated like something David Icke would come out with after an hour in a burning meth lab. And compared to the paranoid drivel rampant among the likes of the Kerry and Kilkenny teams in the last decade, they did actually contain traces of actual interest.
The papers and airwaves have never had more quotes. It’s just that most of it is bullshit.
There’s another unfortunate tendency now for sporting worthies to communicate with the public directly through social networks like Twitter. Thus even greater volumes of carefully spun bullshit are put out there, adding to the pile of information and reducing the quantity of knowledge.
News was once defined as what somebody somewhere doesn’t want you to know. Traditional news-gathering may not be the most popular or reputable business in the world. It might also be a pain in the ass to do. But the new alternative ultimately short-changes the public.
Yet all this suspicion and spinning doesn’t have to be a default setting. If Roger Federer can rise to the top of the tennis world, exhibit a style and a grace on court that is unparalleled, and yet behave off-court in a perfectly sane, balanced, indeed normal way, then it surely ain’t impossible for lesser talents to do the same.
At Wimbledon a few years ago, the BBC ran a feature in which Federer was shown around the studios and the broadcasting trucks of the supposed media enemy. He was genuinely interested, engaged, even funny. And this in the middle of a Grand Slam, which he won, with no recourse to cant about focus, shape or fun.
But then Federer was not trying to hide anything. Ultimately the brouhaha centres on the reality that Giggsy can’t say the same.
