Feature — September / October 2007

Play (Hard!) Ball

Why the sports beat must evolve

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Last summer, celebrity sports columnist Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote the latest in a series of articles denigrating the Chicago White Sox and its fiery manager, Ozzie Guillen. It was the sort of piece that Mariotti has written forever—when he first arrived in Chicago, the paper advertised their new hire on a billboard that read “Sports With An Attitude.”

Guillen’s response was rather atypical, however. He called Mariotti a “fucking fag” during a press conference. He was fined for the slur, but didn’t get much criticism for ripping Mariotti, who isn’t exactly popular among his peers. And in a move that showed little remorse, the official White Sox Web site now links to a blog written by Scott Reifert, one of the team’s media relations directors, who has taken it upon himself to monitor Mariotti’s work and blast him at every perceived slight.

This is not just a case of two notoriously volatile guys doing what they do, but rather part of a broader new reality in professional sports: the increasing willingness of leagues, franchises, and athletes to attack sports writers who write things they don’t like. This aggressive zig is complemented by a message-control zag: use technology to circumvent the press and communicate directly with fans.

Sound familiar? It’s the same strategy that the Bush administration has executed masterfully, going to unprecedented lengths to marginalize and attack the press. So it should come as no surprise to learn that several communications strategists with ties to the White House have gone on to work as consultants to various pro sports leagues and franchises.

Political P.R. firms first gained a toehold in sports in the mid-1990s, when the Pittsburgh Steelers hired a Republican consultant named John Brabender to help push public funding for a new stadium past city and state legislators. That started a cottage industry of consultants advising franchises on how to “convince” (i.e., blackmail, usually by threatening to move to a new city) cities to pay for new stadiums with tax increases. But as unflattering off-field issues like drug use and labor strife have consumed an ever-larger share of the daily sports report, these media experts have broadened their horizons.

After he left the White House, Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s original press secretary, began spinning for Major League Baseball on a variety of issues, including controlling the reaction after the 2005 Capitol Hill steroid hearings. “The need to play both offense and defense communication-wise is similar in both industries,” Fleischer told USA Today at the time. Tucker Eskew and Matthew Dowd, meanwhile, two key advisers in Bush’s reelection campaign of 2004, took the dark art of media control to the National Basketball Association. The left side of the political spectrum has gotten in on the act as well. Democratic consultants Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, for example, have advised the National Hockey League on media strategy.

A large part of this strategy is simply to use technology to remove pesky reporters from the equation. The New York Yankees helped to pioneer this movement, starting the yes Network in 2002 to televise its games and serve as its house organ. About thirty pro teams in various sports, and indeed entire leagues, have followed suit. Last fall, the NFL broadcast several of its games for the first time on the little-seen NFL Network, and will do so again this year.

This approach works on a smaller scale, too, as individual blogs give players the chance to say whatever they want to fans, without passing it through “the filter.” Not content to let athletes have all the fun, Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, uses his blog (BlogMaverick.com) to, among other things, snipe at the press. Recently, he ended a lengthy recounting of perceived media duplicity with, “That’s how the media have evolved in 3 years. In 2004 they misused quotes. Today, they don’t even require quotes. They just make things up.”

Curt Schilling, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, uses his blog (38 Pitches) to update fans on the health of his balky shoulder, explain the thinking behind certain pitch sequences, and rail at what he considers the ineptitude of the local media, in particular the Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who satirized 38 Pitches and its readers in his column this spring.

Much of this is the fairly benign fallout of the digital world we inhabit, where the traditional terms of authority between the press and the public have been upended; the conversation, as it were, is no longer one way. But things do get nasty, particularly when a sports writer runs afoul of the company line. The person who seems to have begun the attack-dog trend is “Rufus Dawes,” the cyber moniker of someone widely rumored in Kansas City media circles to be within the Kansas City Chiefs’ front office, who since 1998 has led a jeremiad on kcchiefs.com against local writers and broadcasters who have criticized the team. His favorite target is Jason Whitlock, an influential sports columnist for the Kansas City Star who also hosts a local radio show.

A Dawes-on-Whitlock sampling:

I believe an argument can be made that he [Whitlock] has lowered the bar as far as media behavior in Kansas City is concerned. He and the nodding sycophants at the various radio stations who have serviced his interests are kings of the low brow and to say the Kansas City Star’s coverage has gone down hill since he arrived in town is like saying Bin Laden has an image problem.

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Comments

Ron Kaplan

Tue 30 Oct 2007 03:20 PM

Sports clubs have been trying to control the press ever since newspapers started covering sports. Club owners often provided writers with food, lodging, and transportation to promote positive stories. When budgetary and other considerations brought an end to this practice, it opened the door for bias-free coverage.

On the other hand, the phenomenon of 24-hour sports radio and television -- like other news formats -- has created an artificial need to fill the time, opening the door for all manner of "reporting," not all of which is informative or even entertaining. One can understand the desire of players to "fight back" by writing their own blogs, but in many cases, there's a reason why these guys are athletes, not journalists.