The strange summer of sports reporting, or: How we learned not to love LeBron

LeBron caused sportswriters to go into a deep depression this summer.  It was bad.  Bars across America were packed with moaning journalists.  My Twitter follows teemed with discussion of Camus and Dostoevsky. I had to talk down four friends on four separate nights each of whom was calling to tell me they were going to end it all, they couldn’t hit the refresh button on LeBron’s website one more time.  City council members in Bristol had to get on the news and tell people to watch their heads for plummeting ESPN employees.

Now, thank God, there’s a little distance.  In hindsight, all the summer shenanigans are being put into perspective.  I managed to get all of my friends into therapy.  The last National Guard unit left Bristol yesterday.

But, as the truth and reconciliation process continues, people still can’t avoid a little flush of embarrassment in the cheeks at the thought of just how low we stooped.

And it was low indeed.  Let’s not mince words: LeBron James’ free agency was accompanied by pure shamelessness on the part of sportswriters.  Reputable reporters were speculating about hidden meanings in Instagram posts.  Venerable news organizations were linking us to internet fan forums where people were tracking airplanes with no one of importance on them.  Anything anyone with a “source” said became prophecy.  Chris Broussard spontaneously morphed into a weatherman and climatologist, analyzing where “the winds are blowing” LeBron.

Until LeBron decided, they all reported everything, whether it was speculation or not, as news.  The mere possibility of news became news.  Which meant fantasy had basically become fact. 

All when, basically, at bottom, we just didn’t know what was going to happen.  And instead of shutting up and waiting, we made things up to keep the news cycle going.

Many have made their peace with this, understood it was a strange, funny, stupid mistake.

Sports news sometimes just reverts from the sophisticated savvy objective reporting on athletic competition to an indulgence of strangest and most disturbing urges.  Our interest in our teams sometimes isn’t anything more than a base tribalism, the lust for our warriors to go out and conquer and stain the streets with blood, which makes us fans.  Our fascination with an athlete’s statistics and performance often isn’t anything more than an obsession.  Part of this passion makes it exciting.  But it also has the tendency to make us crazy.  We can, at times, value the state of excitement for no particular reason at all.

Furthermore, LeBron just is a charming guy, someone who fascinates us.  He is the only player besides perhaps Kobe Bryant who has ever seemed like he could be as successful an athlete as Michael Jordan.  And because he is so uniquely individual a player (unlike Kobe who so very much reminds us of Jordan) this is even more amazing.  We’ll see nothing like him again, so we want to see as much of him as possible.  The way the narrator of that Samsung commercial talks—like he has a LeBron addiction, has to have a daily intake of LeBron to survive—may be crazy, may be borderline pathological.  But we also know it isn’t too far off from describing our veritable need for LeBron news at times.

In the end, then, LeBron draws us to him, and we’re not always drawn to him always in the healthiest ways.  So we got a little worked up, and that’s why we overreached ourselves.  Or so goes the reflections of the saner sportswriters.  They realize it was an instance where writers took liberties with the already lax codes of conduct that apply to sports reporting. And they know that if it becomes standard practice, they are doomed.  So they’ve mended their ways, and come to terms with their overreach.

Others, however, still can’t come around to this view.  Something in them wonders why we were all drawn in so easily in the first place.

In fact, in their frustration and embarrassment, mixed with a good helping of pride, has thus led them to begin to doubt the true nature of their subject, rather than themselves.  The instinct to root can’t be wrong, can it?  The fascination we have with LeBron is real, right?  Then how was this overreach?  How was this wrong?

For them, looking back at this summer only makes them posit a frustrating, frustrated hypothesis.  You can hear being bandied about recently.  It is quite simple, and goes like so: perhaps LeBron isn’t who he seems. 

Of course it wasn’t LeBron’s fault entirely that he caused a media circus, goes this line of thought.  But there is something about him that is hard to grasp, that makes us speculate, and makes our speculations about him continually wrong or baseless.  Because we couldn’t be that wrong, precisely when we knew everything about the guy.  Let’s be frank: we know every detail, he keeps his life completely open to everyone who cares to look, he is relentlessly available to the media, he lives and breathes for speaking out and speaking loudly whatever is on his mind.  He may be, now, more vocal than he has ever been: during the first week of the Donald Sterling fiasco, for example, we witnessed LeBron James speaking his mind unequivocally, vociferously denouncing the man and calling for his removal from the league (suggestions that were not uncontroversial and fraught with complications). How could we have actually failed to find out what was going to happen for so long?  And how could we have been so wrong when it was finally clear what he was going to do?

The answer: he is a mystery precisely because he is an open book.  He has an app that shares his every move and thought, and precisely because of this we can’t ever really be sure whether what we’re watching, seeing, reading about is the real him.  It is genuine most of the time, except for what has to be behind it, which is a huge and massive reserve of privacy which escapes everyone.  Recent stories about LeBron’s mind, his genius, his intelligence and his memory, as interesting as they are in themselves, were the reflex action of a sports news industry that is mulling this over, embarrassed it got outsmarted.  The man outwitted us—so goes the collective thought process—so he has to be smarter. Everything he says is publicized, even down to the smallest detail, and he still keeps doing things that surprise us, that we couldn’t have predicted.  And that’s exactly how you know, then, there has to be something more there, something deeper down that he’s not showing us.  We know everything about him, and we know nothing.

Sure then, these writers conclude, maybe we became a little desperate to find out clues to this mystery man’s mind in the first place.  Maybe we should learn not to take things that far in the future.  But, in the end, it wasn’t entirely our fault.  There is something that is just tricky, even duplicitous about LeBron.

There are heavy racial codes behind this line of thinking—just like there were more hanging around all the concern about LeBron’s “laziness” in his “Cramp Game.”  But it also turns on a peculiar logic that we find in larger popular culture recently around the issue of transparency.  Will Leitch articulated it perfectly in a recent column in New York magazine, though he was using it there for another purpose than to describe the overreach of the media (he was discussing why exactly we might be more interested in offseason information in general than sporting events).  Leitch argues that social media technologies do the opposite of what they seem to do.  Despite all appearances, we’re kept further away from players than ever because of Twitter and other forms of social media.  Instead of bringing us closer to the athlete—Leitch says—all the information we get about them now shrouds their real core identity in a cloud of unknowing.

It’s a perverse notion, and it trades on the notion that information is some kind of burden, the modern form of the myth that ignorance is bliss.  When information is merely worked-over speculation, of course, that’s a different story, as Leitch himself recently pointed out a hard-hitting column on how rumors and trade speculation is simply not news (Leitch is one of the sportswriters above who very much has come to terms with the overreach that happened this summer).  Pseudo-information is not news.  But the corollary to this is that real information is news, no matter how much of it we get.  To argue that ignorance about athletes is somehow preferable to having too much information about them is then backwards. If what athletes say and post and tweet reports on their reality, it gives you that much more of reality to know and enjoy.

Nevertheless, the “information-as-burden” notion is a popular one, and it runs so deep because it appeals to a generation that is fundamentally and essentially confused about how to cope with the opportunities afforded by social media.  And to get a real sense of just how confused this generation is, all you have to do is look at Dave Eggers’ The Circle, published last October.

Eggers in the book describes a society ruled by a company like Facebook, where privacy is a thing of the past and users are shamed into making everything they do available for public consumption and inspection.  It describes this society in a manner like Orwell, by following the dreary existence of one of its new employees, as she slowly becomes enslaved to its ideology.  It closes with her eventually encountering a revolutionary who realizes the threat the company poses to privacy and turning him to the corporation.

It is a brilliant book in one respect: it exposes the culture of shame that subtly hides behind the moral arguments in favor of transparency in business, politics, sports, or any area of life in which there are organizations liable to corruption, secrecy, duplicity, under-the-table wheeling and dealing.  Transparency, like anything, is not a pure good, a solution to all problems, and to tout it as such involves attributing a fundamental state of corruption to all human action—unless, of course, it is publicized.  What Eggers exposes is that companies like Facebook trade in an updated, savvier notion of original sin, which they attribute to all members not brave enough to participate.

As a critique of a certain organizational ethos, this is savvy—though perhaps Eggers would have made his case better in an essay than in a rather plodding 500 page piece of dystopian fiction.  And as a statement on how this ethos is absolutely vital to the success of social media companies—how the triumph of moral imperative to be transparent is in their interest probably more than anyone else—it is valuable and no doubt correct.  But insofar as its critical skepticism becomes merely antagonism to transparency, it becomes a crypto-conservative piece of propaganda in favor of rights to privacy.

What many users of social media long for is something other than the plutocratic populism that is mistakenly dubbed “libertarian” by its supporters: they long, that is, for the return of the Public, and seek, by publishing what they do, to construct one, despite the railings of nutjobs for ever more privatization, ever more atomization of the body politic.  Social media companies are in the construction business, as it were, and the reason they have become such enemies of larger and more traditional institutions of mass media is that these latter have sought for years now to dismantle—through stupid, idiotic news, through shoddy reporting, through demoralizing those who try and share information through any other institutional framework than their news outlets—precisely what social media companies are rebuilding.

At the same time, and perhaps even more significantly, Eggers is an advocacy of a model of human psychology and motive that is fundamentally flawed.  For this larger political attitude that is antagonistic to the de-privatization of individual behavior finds support in the idea that human intentions are fundamentally not what they appear to be.  That they always have something more behind them.  That they can’t be taken at face value.  And, basically, that they are to be doubted before they are trusted.

This is really the nub of the matter, because this is everything that the value of transparency, promoted by the use of social media, has been designed to question.  Transparency is based on the idea that we can take our intentions for what they are: this is why the more they are available for scrutiny, the better.  Keeping things in the dark keeps them out of reach and scrutiny, out of the way of commentary, dialogue, cooperation.  At the same time, no one with nothing to hide ever had to worry about putting his thoughts out there as loud as possible.

There is something sinister in this, Eggers is right to note—a sort of guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.  But the idea is also much more positive than this.  It is based on an idea that humans, if they state their intentions clearly to one another, can trust that those intentions are carried out.  It is an effort, indeed, to rebuild the general sense—lacking since about the 70s—that the social fabric can take the fact that we all genuinely want to be in social relationships for granted, that we all genuinely do, when it comes down to it, trust each other before we doubt one another.  If it weren’t the case—so the reasoning goes—there simply would be no society in general.  Which is what has been the result of assuming that human intentions aren’t to be trusted over the latter half of the twentieth century: with no sense that social bonds are fundamentally stronger than the pressures that divide society, there is no reason really to have a society.  You get politicians, rulers, saying “society doesn’t exist,” and legislating accordingly—and you get people bizarrely believing them.

On a more basic level, you just keep waiting, when you hear something someone says to you, for their “true” intention somehow behind it to come out, to make clear its coded message in whatever they jaw on about.  You ignore, actually, what they have to say; you don’t pay any attention to it except as something that conceals what they “really” mean.  What you pay attention to is your intention of what they mean.  You interpret, rather than ever really listen.

To see in this this deafness the ideal condition of informed discourse and conversation and to brand transparency as a threat is yet another instance of the late 20th century/early 21st century consumerist worship of authenticity and self-realization, which places no value on facts beyond those that are relative and displays a tired, incurious attitude towards the richness of reality—which sometimes, sorry to say, doesn’t conform to your interpretation of what you think it is, even as it repays you in full by being only that much more interesting.  And in this respect, this doubt and distrust is typical of the generation of sentimental, self-conscious, “creative non-fiction” writers led by Eggers and David Foster Wallace who were trying to find some way, any way, around and beyond the even more (if you can believe it) blasted, tired, unserious, apathetic, horribly ironic and fatalistic culture of crushed and broken baby-boomer idealists which they inherited.  To these writers’ credit, they are skeptical of the authenticity they trade upon and use to their own ends.  But the same can’t be said of the culture itself, which prizes this virtue even as it destroys the very basis of authentic trust.

And this brings us back from what Eggers has to say to the way act towards these theories promulgated by sportswriters recently.

Instead of encouraging interpretation, instead of encouraging deafness to what people actually say, social media turns communication into something more like an act and a gesture, rather than a broadcast.  Offered up trustingly to the public, it is not attempt to get something across but is, as a statement, simply done as much as said.  It is accomplished, rather than unfinished, up for deconstruction, endless analysis of what it might mean from points of view which don’t, often, even exist. 

So a person using it, like an athlete, doesn’t offer whatever they offer up for you to dissect it.  He tells you what he tells you.  There is nothing more to it, nothing behind it.  There is no scheming.  If it is done for a reason, strategically, that reason is also visible in the image, in the statement.  There is no reserve, nothing coded in what it conveys.  Images distributed on social media don’t cloak or cover up anything behind them.  What is made transparent simply is transparent.

All of which makes this speculation about there being something deeper to LeBron seem rather silly, and even a little malicious.  It comes from the types of misunderstanding that inform Eggers’ book, and the same belief that authenticity is really the same thing as privacy.

To imply that the reporting of what LeBron was doing this summer took place because the reporters were unable to understand their subject or were even misled--well, that is a bit rich.  And it is more pessimistic about the state of sports reporting than we need be.

We aren’t missing something deep—no one needs to go any deeper to actually figure out LeBron’s more secret machinations, and how he plots to cover them up.  We just got really worked up, and handled the thing poorly.

We don’t need to be more suspicious, we just need to be smarter about how we handle ourselves.  We’re not dupes. We might just be excited and, in our excitement, occasionally stupid.