How Marshawn Lynch Says So Much By Barely Saying Anything

It’s as if they’ve forgotten that he’s one of the best running backs in the NFL, rushing for 1,306 yards and 13 touchdowns in the 2014 regular season. But reporters, as creative as they try to be, won’t make it about his skill or his football IQ. It’s about their frustration with not being able to control him. They tried to do the same thing to Richard Sherman last year, because he trash talked after an NFC championship win. But Sherman controlled things with a different articulacy that nobody could deny.

To be honest, I’ve been to a lot of press conferences with a lot of reporters, and seen many idiots at work. They typically ask black men stupid questions that pretty much equate to calling them “boy,” while white guys get every benefit of the doubt and are subject to well-thought out queries designed to elicit diatribes of intelligence—y’know, like Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.

So Lynch chooses to simply let them make themselves look stupid because there is nothing more frustrating to a reporter than someone who won’t answer the doggone question. But an editor I had years ago suggested to me that it’s because the line of questioning might be debasing or insulting.

Now, there are athletes who are jerks  to reporters just like there are businessmen, politicians, entertainers, and others who make a journalist’s job hard. But that’s part of the territory; we go into this business knowing it’s hard, and there seems to be some pompous assumption that because Lynch and others have to respond to the media, that they owe reporters these great sound bytes.

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