This story is part of ESPN The Magazine's Ideas of the Year Issue -- a look at the people, moves and moments that changed sports in 2015. For more, visit espn.com/IdeasIssue, or look for the issue on newsstands Dec. 11. Subscribe today!
I WILL ADMIT to experiencing a certain glee, watching it unfold. Perhaps you felt similarly. It was a long time coming anyway.
Marshawn Lynch refused to utter one syllable to the media during the 2013 NFL season. Faced with sanctions from the league, he began to answer journalists' questions with repeated words or phrases, variations of "Nope" or "I appreciate it." On Super Bowl media day this past January, he responded to each query with, "I'm just here so I won't get fined." The next day, his rejoinder was, "You know why I'm here." The day after that, though, he had something to say.
"All week, I done told y'all what's up," Lynch explained. "And for some reason, y'all continue to come back and do the same thing that y'all did." He went on to harangue them for 120 seconds or so, a veritable deluge during which Lynch wondered what their deal was, just why they kept trying to shuck him open. He laughed a few times and shrugged a lot. He seemed genuinely baffled. He closed by saying, "I done talked -- all of my requirements are fulfilled. So now, for this next three minutes, I'll just be looking at y'all, the way y'all looking at me."
It was as if Marshawn Luther had nailed "Thanks for asking" to the door of Old Media. Athletes started refusing to participate in the hoary old ritual. Richard Sherman lectured the media with the help of a cardboard cutout. Serena Williams avowed that talking to them after a match was the last thing she wanted to do. Stephen Curry diverted their attention by holding his darling homunculus of a daughter, as if showcasing what a real, organic thing looked like. Cincinnati Reds manager Bryan Price dropped a cluster of 77 F-bombs on a beat reporter. The Wisconsin men's basketball team ignored everyone after becoming enraptured with the stenographer's machine, the very machine fabricating the pseudo-event they were taking part in.
The consensus among fans was: Hallelujah. The cracks in the edifice were spreading. In fact, the only people upset by the sudden fracturing of news conference protocol seemed to be the beat reporters themselves. But what, I ask you, is more perfunctory than a postgame news conference? More anachronistic? What is the point of this Kabuki, played out nightly: "Hey X, Y here from the Mudville Z. How did it feel to recover that fumble/rob that home run/hit that buzzer beater/make that sprawling save?" "Well, I was just thrilled, you know. Thrilled to be able to contribute, thrilled and real pleased to be playing the game I love, especially with these teammates and this coach, under the watchful gaze of my Lord and Savior, and also the visiting liaison to my lifestyle-brand partner, Goobers."
Teams have Twitter accounts from which to break news. Athletes have Instagram accounts through which to bare their souls. Derek Jeter even started a Web outlet last year, the Players' Tribune, on which Kobe Bryant recently announced his retirement. Nobody is lacking for a platform. What could possibly be bad about sportspeople telling their own stories, sharing their own views while stonewalling the middlemen who might warp those stories and views, or try to fit them into their own agendas?
And anyway, I thought, this is America. We don't just have a right to our personal narratives -- we have a duty to stitch them together, wear them proudly. Me, you, Serena, Marshawn. We're all authoring our selves with the tales we choose to tell, the pictures we choose to post, the comments we choose to leave. No other person is allowed to impinge upon this right to first-person narration. Right?
This year, at last, athletes began to realize the moral ideal of autonomy that Walt Whitman was fantasizing about when he wrote of the heroic person who "walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not," who "no longer take[s] things at second or third hand ..."
Athletes began to realize this. But there is one above them who mastered this self-determination long ago. One who always had the courage never to submit or yield, to instead hurl defiance at every opportunity. The founder of the "Patriot Way." The veiled lord himself. Belichick.
Before this year of media reformation was out, I resolved to pay homage to its spiritual patriarch in person.
I SECURED A press pass to the Patriots' Week 8 matchup, a Thursday night game against the Dolphins. At this point, the Patriots had cruised to a 6 -- 0 record and looked poised to defend last season's Super Bowl title.
Far below the press box, pacing the field, was the man himself. Bill Belichick kept his arms folded and his chin tucked, sphinxlike. I watched him nod in agreement, conferring via headset as to his next turn in this game of human Stratego, yet I never saw his mouth move. With the help of binoculars, I began to fixate on the small gap between his lips, scanning for the fine mesh screen behind which the smaller, truer Belichick looked out on the world, as if in a Mickey Mouse suit.
By refusing to play along with these people in the press box, Belichick has allowed himself to be transformed, by way of their writing and broadcasting, into a humorless curmudgeon. This is a persona, to be sure; a mask that Belichick donned long ago. What he understood was that over time, many of the journalists up here would begin to mistake this mask for the man's actual face. And so, in leading them to believe that he is a reticent grump -- and not an unflinching actor in addition to the greatest coach of all time -- Belichick has gotten the media to direct their questions to the mask.
And he loves it. Former players have said that Belichick spends his mornings walking on a treadmill while reading the day's press clippings, highlighting as he goes. Then, in team meetings, he coaches his players on what questions they are about to field. ("He was about 95 percent right somehow," one former player says.) "Weather is not a factor," Belichick tells them to say. Or, "Last two years mean nothing." Or, "All that matters is this week and focusing on this game."
Watch his old news conferences. Watch how he smirks inwardly when he says "That's a great question" to what was obviously not a great question. Watch and be reminded of your own dad, or at least the archetypal American Dad, who also withholds like crazy while treating those around him as if they are cogs in his machinations.
After scoring on their opening drive, the Patriots hung a safety and a field goal on the Dolphins. I was following the action, leaning around the dividers in the high, thick press box windows, when I realized: Actually going to a game is antithetical to the true nature of professional football. I thought of the TV booth, the effects truck, the people all around me. It was their editorials and roundtable jabberfests that harbored, nourished and ever-enlarged my football expectations. They embedded the culturewide imperative to pay attention to this, care about this. Yet the relationship was much more complex than that. Football would never have become America's secular religion without the media, including the likes of the Worldwide Leader. Today it is far and away the highest-rated content across every channel of transmission, yet it wasn't until the advent of broadcasting that the NFL began to be considered something other than a regional curiosity. As the history Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport makes clear: "The National Football League has never existed in any meaningful way without the media. (Even in its earliest years, without local newspapers NFL games would have been the philosopher's tree falling in the forest that nobody hears, except for a few hundred 'sports' with bets on the outcome.)"
By halftime, the Patriots were leading 19-0, and Belichick's team was executing flawlessly, mechanistically, boringly. Yet there was a kind of hypnotic satisfaction in seeing them dismantle the Dolphins. It was a satisfaction not unlike that of watching a tree get sucked into a wood chipper -- witnessing a thing go in one end and emerge from the other completely transformed.
DEEP UNDER THE bleachers, in a damp concrete tunnel, the media massed behind a series of black curtains, waiting for the go-ahead to flood into the Patriots' locker room. We chatted amiably for about 45 minutes when, suddenly, we were herded through the curtains in an anxious, vaguely bovine manner. These millionaires were going to answer our questions with linguistic effluvia -- if they deigned to answer them at all.
From one player to the next, the scrum went like this: Unencumbered reporters got closest to the player in his stall, gathering in a semicircle and probing with recorders like hummingbird beaks. Then came the radio people, pushing their mics past the other reporters' shoulders. TV cameramen carried step stools, and these they placed behind the radio people, in order to shoot unobstructed footage. The player in the middle of all this called to mind one of those little birds that hops around in a crocodile's mouth, pecking at this bit or maybe that one, but ultimately getting out of there before the crocodile's jaws snap shut.
Jaundiced in the light of the camera, cornerback Logan Ryan said, "Yeah, uh, turnovers are contagious." Defensive tackle Alan Branch reified his professional purpose, stating, "I want to stop the run every game, man." Kicker Stephen Gostkowski told us what he thought was nice: "It's nice to be confident, have fun and go out there and feel like you're going to succeed." Defensive end Chandler Jones answered quietly, beads of moisture twinkling against his skin. What did he say? No one around me seemed to know, or care.
Civilians talk about wanting athletes to open up more, be more human. (See, for example, the Tom Brady quote in which he unconsciously delivered on this desire while foiling it at the same time: "I'm a human," he said. "There's no doubt. I'm definitely human.") Yet whenever an athlete dare speak his or her mind -- think of the statement issued by Browns receiver Andrew Hawkins in response to police shootings -- the ghoulies in the comments section decry, "STICK TO SPORTS!!!!!" Even with message control ceded to teams, players and coaches, sportspeople are still loath to be themselves. There's too much playing time, public opinion and money on the line. The incentive to be innocuous, to promote synergy and not slip up, is insurmountably high.
As such, the baseline unit is the one-person limited liability company, the corporate soul. We are on the receiving end of this: I believe @Recovery_Water helped prevent me from getting a concussion based on a bad hit! [angel emoji] #NanoBubbles -- @DangeRussWilson. Even in the case of the Players' Tribune, Jeter's for-us-by-us Web organ, the voice of each "contributing editor" is so inoffensive and antiseptic, so obviously ghostwritten by an intern named Don, that perusing it makes me wonder what life would be like if I too burned my fingerprints off. Like, what could this possibly even mean, "Diana Taurasi": "My home compass is Spanish-language television, mixed with Argentinian pride, mixed with Italian phrases rolling off the tongue, mixed with milk. I want a lot of everything."
The exception that proved the rule was Kobe Bryant's announcing his retirement with a poem on the site. This poem sounded like Kobe, insofar as it made no mention of anything but Kobe and his ambivalent love affair with basketball:
I did everything for YOU
Because that's what you do
When someone makes you feel as
Alive as you've made me feel.
The Lakers printed this ode to monomania on heavy card stock and handed it out to fans, even though this poem is so clearly not for fans, or teammates, or coaches or journalists. The poem is for Kobe and his muse-slash-bane. Reading it, I cannot help but feel ickily implicated, as if I've walked into the wrong hotel conference room and been cheerfully forced to bear witness as an exotic-car salesman renews his vows to a high-class massage therapist.
When people cheer on the death of the news conference, what they're also cheering on, perhaps unwittingly, is a future in which all of us will engage in this kind of careful brand management. In such a future, I'll have my inner circle, the few people I know and care about from real, corporeal life. Then I'll have my fans and followers, the fellow travelers who don't really know me but enjoy or support my curated presence. Then I'll have my "haters," the people who misinterpret or misconstrue my presented selves, or who actively work against my narrative. These individuals are not with me, physically or in spirit, so they must be against me. This is a feedback-looped orientation toward the wider world that another, better, writer once summed up as: "He who does not feel me is not real to me."
During his media day news conference, Marshawn Lynch put that sentiment this way: "I don't know what image y'all trying to portray of me. But it don't matter what y'all think, what y'all say about me. Because when I go home at night, the same people that I look in the face, my family that I love, ha, that's all that really matter to me. So y'all can go and make up whatever y'all want to make up because I don't say enough for y'all to go and put anything out on me."
This declaration still makes me want to stand up and cheer, sound as it does like something a pioneer in a cabin on the frontier might say. But -- and this is ignoring the fact that his trolling flouted an obligation listed in his $31 million contract -- Lynch got at the crux of something capital-T True here. Something that works against the point he was trying to make. Real adult life, the face-to-face relationships that allow one to understand as well as to be understood, is founded upon messiness, dialogue, the abdication of total control. I alone cannot truly know who I am. I alone don't even get final say. I can have some idea. This idea can be based upon the selves I put forward. Yet it's the people whose lives are affected by my selves -- they get to tell me what all that self-presentation looks like. They get to measure the distance between the kind of guy I say I am and the kind of guy I happen to be. It is unlikely that Lynch, Jeter and Belichick have any interest in hearing what kind of guys they are. This is understandable. Although they are as in the limelight as anyone in our culture can be, "spelunk the darkest caves of your psyche, in public" is listed nowhere in their job descriptions.
"STICK TO SPORTS!!!!!" you might be saying about now. Fair enough. I will not mention the recent TV debate in which moderators were demonized for questioning the backstories and assertions of individuals trying to become the leader of the free world. Nor will I mention how the University of Missouri football team used social media to tell the world that it was going on strike until the university's president stepped down. When that president did step down and media came to document the campus' reaction, there was a literal sign of the times staked into the quad -- no media / safe space -- in addition to an assistant professor of mass media who was filmed saying, "Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here?" This same assistant professor had previously posted on her Facebook page: "Hey folks, students fighting racism on the MU campus want to get their message into the national media. Who among my friends knows someone who would want a scoop on this incredible topic?"
So what's going to happen when each of us is broadcasting "who I am" while simultaneously forbidding or disregarding any scrutiny? What will it mean when we are publishing personal Pravdas, proclaiming that yields of wellness are up, up, up behind the iron curtain? Let's forget the civic, political or even economic implications of this. (Which, ho-ho, are they manifold.) Just -- isn't this lonesome? Liberating, yes. emocratizing, for sure. But emancipating yet isolating? In a fall-of-man-ish way that will cause me to suspect that everything outside my direct control is a potential source of unfreedom?
OTHER JOURNALISTS OCCUPIED about one-third of the plush leather chairs terraced theater-style in front of the dais in the Patriots' film-slash-news-conference-room. On it, a heavily bubble-jacketed Brady was looking like some precious figurine about to be boxed back up in the attic. He answered questions with a kind of smiling incredulity. "What a playmaker he is," Brady said dreamily, talking about everyone and no one at once.
Belichick slid into the room and stood to the left of the dais, out of frame. There was a small pack of reporters about 5 feet from him, but none approached. He leaned into a corner jutting from the wall's architecture, putting all of his weight onto its right angle. He kept his hands in his pockets and his face fixed, rocking back and forth, toggling his spine against the edge. He watched Brady just as intensely as he does during a game, radiating neither joy nor love but grim determination.
I thought then of all the Kremlinology that people engage in, trying to divine the real Bill Belichick from whatever scraps he leaves. Commenters, both official and unofficial, have looked to his on-field body language and cryptic sound bites for clues. They've dissected pictures of him kissing his girlfriend. They've pored over Vines of him eating "like a gremlin." They've read way too much into the fact that he sang "Love Potion No. 9" at a party. I, myself, read way too much into the answer he gave during the last Super Bowl media day, when the daughter of one of his players asked Belichick what his favorite stuffed animal was. "I'd like, uh, like a little puppet," he said, "that you can kinda put your fingers in ... it's a little monkey ... and then he can talk."
Belichick took to the dais. He started delivering a monologue of platitudes, as if trying to get them all out at once. "It was a tough week mentally," he croaked in his strangled-sounding voice. "But they really pushed themselves. I thought our preparation was good and they played hard tonight."
Eventually, a question was asked. Belichick stared into the middle distance. He appeared to be imagining some empty, perspectiveless afterlife in which jaunty supermarket Muzak was overlaid with the tortured screams of this interrogator. Then he snapped to and answered, "It was good team defense, which it always is when you play good."
There were a few more questions about special teams and Dion Lewis. But no one asked the question that I wanted answered, the only question to ask, I thought, which was: "Bill, how does it feel to be so controlling? So single-minded? To be heir to -- and apotheosis of -- Vince Lombardi, George S. Patton and Niccolo Machiavelli? At what cost is this success? How can this possibly be enjoyable, still? Who are you?"
There was a lull in the back-and-forth. Camera shutters clicked together like insect legs. Belichick sucked his lips inward, nodded. A wall-mounted digital clock blinked past midnight. I thought about asking my question. He climbed off the dais and left.
BEFORE I DEPARTED the stadium, I spotted big, beautiful, inordinately dumb-seeming Rob Gronkowski. I watched him make his way to the NFL Network set. Nothing especially illuminating happened there -- until Gronk declared his deep need to smash the many pumpkins and gourds arranged on set. He had to be told, again and again, that the pumpkins and gourds were, in fact, fake.
I loved it. I love Gronk. I think I do, at least. But was he really this childlike and guileless? Was this really a joyous burst of realness from the freckle-faced mischief maker trapped deep in that archangelic body? Or was this all just another performance, one carefully calibrated so that gourd-spiking would look like a spontaneous burst of unmediated character but was actually as real as an institutional "leak"?
The tools allowing for PR tactics and airtight message control are available to all of us sole proprietors now. Yet legal definitions be damned, a person is not a corporation is not a person. Real humanity has always pointed toward something or someone outside of the individual. And the truest, most irreducible quality belonging to such a human being might well be a quality that that human being doesn't recognize about himself, or otherwise withholds. It might be something that another person needs to notice, and call his attention to.
Gronk is a transcendent athlete and an ostensibly fascinating dude. This evening, I witnessed him running routes as if possessing a third eye above the field, an eye that grants him the same all-encompassing perspective we fans are privileged with. Gronk probably cannot articulate what it's like, living with this gift. Probably because he has spent his entire life honing it, bridling it, sacrificing most everything else at the expense of it. Who's to say?
Maybe one of us could help him try.
