Pat Jordan, who wrote about the difficulties of trying to interview Jose Canseco on Deadspin.com, does it again for Slate.com, this time with Josh Beckett, who declined the honor of a New York Times’ profile.
This has become the curse of modern sports journalism. Writers and fans alike no longer get to know the object of their affections in a way they did years ago. Athletes see us as their adversaries, not as allies in their achievements. They are as much celebrities as rock stars and Hollywood actors are. They live insular lives behind a wall of publicists, agents, and lawyers. They don’t interact with fans or writers. They mingle only with other celebrities at Vegas boxing matches, South Beach nightclubs, and celebrity golf events, all behind red-velvet VIP ropes. We can only gawk at them as if at an exotic, endangered species at a zoo.
I’ve been trying to get a hold of Scott Schoeneweis, the New York Mets’ reliever, for a project at my day job. Every year we produce a “Source” magazine, a directory of services within the community for our readers. I’ve been writing the celebrity profiles for the last three issues, which have a unifying theme. This year it’s sports personalities from New Jersey; Schoeneweis is from Long Branch. Repeated requests for a brief telephone interview have yielded negative results. Whether it’s the Mets not wanting to be bothered or the ballplayer making the decision is impossible to tell from their responses.
Now I know we’re not the Times over here (not that such cachet did Jordan much good), but I would have hoped that Schoeneweis would have embraced the opportunity to reconnect with his old stomping grounds. Maybe he didn’t enjoy his time growing up in the Garden State.
A veteran sports writer I have chatted with bemoans the way things have changed for his profession. In the old days, he told me, players and writers were relatively equals when it came to salaries. This is obviously no longer the case and he felt that had a lot to do with the disconnect. And I imagine the demands on their time from all the new media can get a bit intrusive, especially when stories such as this make the front page. (By the way, NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, included this item in its May 25 program, available from iTunes or the WWDTM Web site (scroll down to Opening Panel Round /”Why the Yankees’ locker room is turning into a Giambi’s Secret store…” and click the link).
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