Warriors beware of false praise

It was a talented footballer I was waiting for, a fine young man and a willing if dull interview when he got around to it, but that wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking: "How stupid is this? I don’t want to wait for this guy. This guy doesn’t want me to wait for him. I know what he’s going to say. He knows what I’m going to ask. The readers know what I’m going to write. And I know what they’re going to say if they read it."

I left without talking to him and walked out of the Hasely Crawford Stadium feeling as bad as many football fans who will not be able to purchase tickets today, despite forming a line for over three hours.

I was sitting next to an aged sportswriter in the press box the other day. We were football/cricket writers together then, covering the Trinidad and Tobago team, the West Indies, secondary schools football and club football. One senior sportswriter had finished his script minutes before me, and I looked at his computer screen as he attached some notes to the end of his copy. He had called his notes "Extra Points."

I said, "Hell, that’s football."

"I know," he said, "I’m tired of cricket."

But this was worse for another sportswriter, definitely. He said he was tired of cricket, tired of horseracing, real tired of basketball, excruciatingly tired of hockey, contemptuous of boxing, downright hateful of golf and tennis, and immensely uninterested in auto racing, dog racing, cat chasing, and anything else they might have on TV.

He now seemed to have hated sports all his life, and hated writing about them, and I said he was aware from reading the professional journals; those were not the two main things people are looking for in an old sports columnist.

Sports journalism in Trinidad and Tobago biblicises certain players, imprints their perfectly crafted image onto timeless collector’s edition videos or leather-bound books, while simultaneously building databases on the anecdotal idiocies of others or the pathologies of a few, then sell it all to a sports-addled public eager for violence or competitive validation or some definitive moral scorecard.

Not to be critical.

The joke (I’d have used "irony" but it’s more a joke) is this: An actual living hero is ten times as likely to walk down your street, sit next to you on a bus, or hold the door for you at the library, than to appear on your television between the never varying pre-game yammer and the post-game lament about who "stepped up" and who just "didn’t want it bad enough."

I’ve been prodded to think hard about these kinds of things in the last couple of years, my first back on earth after twenty-two in the galaxy of sports stars. I’m asked about it all the time, sometimes by people who can’t believe that some sportswriters could walk away from the sports columnist’s gig. But now with Trinidad and Tobago on the verge of World Cup qualification several of these old farts that left are coming back looking for hand outs and saying they were just on a break.

For some, the main factor of discontent is not only financial, but rather a sense of outrage at the impenetrable sense of entitlement among the athletes. This is not often their fault. Indeed, most of them are unaware of it.

But a culture that rewards athletic prowers from the time boys and girls are able to walk has, by the time an athlete comes to a station that attracts media coverage, produced a creature that expects its strengths will be celebrated and even embellished while its weaknesses will be tolerated, and that the culture exists merely to extend privileges and ignore flaring evidence of arrested development. With Trinidad and Tobago’s blessing, athletes raised their expectations in terms of remuneration and respect, in particular footballers travelling to the World Cup deserve much more than they are getting.

They have somehow been put in a position to demand respect without giving any and it must work both ways, if our young footballers are to learn and our current quality footballers are to be given their rightful due.

But a larger issue to me is the way the media have simultaneously lowered the standards for hero status even in the Caribbean.

In the United States, when a great boxer or great basketballer re-retired, the sports media become a hurricane of idolatry that devastated all established perspective. That player was the plain and simple best basketball player/boxer ever, but journalism’s attempt to solidify that notion for history was so overwrought it was embarrassing, even sickening.

We must support our players fully but not allow them to become complacent, or to big for the game, if only the "old sportswriters" did their job better, then our lives would be easier.

For now, we need to give credit where it is due to the 1973 football team, that was cheated by a referee, to the entire staff and team of 1989 (Strike Squad), because they have both honoured this country without proper praise from the old sportswriters, who are back on again with our young— Warriors.

Beware my Warriors of those who feign your friendship in football.