Virtual Reality, Empathy and the Impossibility of Athlete Interviews
By: Kevin Biggers
Tags: Sports, Virtual Reality, Media

NFL players are physical geniuses. Intellectually, they range from being geniuses to being bafflingly, nut-numbingly stupid. But physically, as far as stuff like say agility and proprioception is concerned, they are all geniuses. And it’s funny because when we encounter geniuses in other fields, the regular lay person rarely requires the genius to explain their genius in as perfunctorily and repetitively of a manner as we ask of athletes. When three scientists last year won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the brain’s internal positioning system, I highly doubt anyone in the press asked them something along the lines of, “So talk about what was going through your head when you were writing the fourth paragraph of your paper on spatial representation in the entorhinal cortex.” Yet we DEMAND this from athletes, before games, after games, sometimes, like during the week leading up to every Super Bowl, multiple times to discuss the very same upcoming game.

This is how I came to think about David Foster Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” during the Marshawn Lynch vs. The Press thing (not to mention the recently preceding Russell Westbrook thing and the Arian Foster thing from earlier this year) and in the week leading up to this year’s Super Bowl. Wallace, in just a few paragraphs scattered throughout what is a review of Austin’s memoir, wholly gets at why it’s so futile to ask athletes to explain their genius. Because from there, it seems really simple why the whole locker room interview or post-game press conference, which players are now more or less required to endure in order to play in the actual games, is sheer inanity.

Genius does not necessarily lead to genius in other things.

“Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true techne so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than [Immanuel] Kant’s glass jaw or [T.S.] Eliot’s inability to hit the curve.”

When genius is genius it’s natural.

“It’s not an accident that great athletes are often called ‘naturals,’ because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even—and, for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and [Tracy] Austin, especially—under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.”

Genius is inarticulable because it is silent.

“The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.”

What we mistake as dumb is really, possibly the essence of genius.

“It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift but because they are its essence.”

This isn’t the part where I say, “If we all understand this to be true, then why to do we still go through with the whole practice of it?” Because that’s not the case. I find most people who talk about sports and most people who think about sports really, truly don’t get this. We (I’m guilty of this as well) need something to confirm what we just saw. Aimless noise is more comforting than a silence as sheer as genius. There’s a reason Wallace’s later New York Times essay “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” was so universally lauded: Wallace got as close as nearly anyone to finally dissecting and getting at the heart of how a human being transcends normality to become a physical genius.

But this is only one piece and one writer (who sadly is dead). Take a look at the Super Bowl Media Week coverage. There are many other writers and reporters and content websites and TV channels who continue endeavoring in the same inane rituals of the locker room interview and press conference questioning without much if any success. It’s not even Sisyphean because at least Sisyphus gets to the top of the hill for a brief period of time. The people involved in what Bryan Curtis of Grantland perfectly calls “The Worst Question in Sports: What We Talk About When We Say ‘Talk About’” are not even close to the top of the Sisyphean hill because they’re at the bottom, barely moving.

“After beating the Celtics on Monday, the Clippers’ Blake Griffin was asked by a reporter, “Talk about, as far as, you know, you’re winning — you got a two-game winning streak.” Griffin — a decent interview — gamely tries to answer. The problem is that he has not been asked a question. So he replies, “Um, the winning is great.””

But “Talk about…” isn’t the only culprit here:

“The How Big Was isn’t even an ask. It’s a chance for a reporter to reach up to the lectern and give the coach or player a high five. The most famous example of this kind of question came at Super Bowl VI, when CBS’s Tom Brookshier built a Mayan temple of praise to the Cowboys’ Duane Thomas before asking, “Are you that fast?” Thomas looked at him and said, “Evidently.” Another cousin of the Talk About is the Walk Me Through. “Walk me through that one-handed catch you had against the Broncos on November 2.” It at least begs for a multipart answer. A third cousin once-removed is Expand on That. “Talk about the series at first-and-goal within the 5,” a reporter asked 49ers safety Eric Reid this season. “Philadelphia had a chance to win the game. Expand on that.” When a reporter says, “Expand on that,” he is pleading, “Talk more about … ””

That last quote gets at what the Marshawn Lynch thing during that week was all about. It wasn’t about disrespect. It wasn’t really about responsibility or obligation. It was, as Curtis describes in another excellent Super Bowl Media Week piece, an existential crisis for reporters who get paid and want to continue to get paid to ask these questions. People who want to transcribe or present the answers as fresh insight into the process of being a genius. Which is understandable. Life is varyingly hard and having a job makes life less varyingly hard. Which is understandable. It’s dramatically easier and it seems more lucrative, to write multiple articles full of quotes about “hard work” and “coming together as a team” than to write a single think piece on why and what it means when one of the most important players in the Super Bowl refuses to answer the media’s questions.

Because real empathy is difficult. Total empathy is impossible. To make the often thankless, mistake-rife and humbling journey to understand someone, especially someone who is very much not like you, without being reductive or trite or exploitative can be absurdly time-consuming and complex. For any writer who isn’t a well-compensated long-form features writer, empathy can be anywhere from inconveniencing to irreconcilable with the very idea of making a living.