I’ve been slacking over the Olympics this year, which is sorta odd. I’m usually an Olympics junky, especially when the host city is in a conflicting time zone. I remember staying up to all hours for the 88 Summer Olympics – had to keep an eye on the medal count – and remember watching the 80 USA hockey team win in real time, since it was in NY.

This year, I’ve just been picking up random results from the ‘net and watching whatever interviews are being shoved into the morning newscasts… the TV interviews have made me sorta jaded recently, actually. Maybe it’s because I’ve only been seeing the recaps, but it’s the TV interviews that lead me to the question of: Why Do We Do This?

I don’t get it.

Every single post-game sports interview that I’ve seen since 1972 has been the same:

– So, how do you feel?

— I feel pretty good, I mean, yeah, I feel pretty good!

– How do what did you thing of [a very good or very bad] play?

— I think it was OK.

– And how do you feel?

— Ya know, [I/we] came in here to do our best and I think we’ve done that.

– What’s next for you?

— I’m going to wait and see, ya know, take it a day at a time.

In Bull Durham, there’s a scene where the veteran catcher tells the rookie pitcher that he needs to work on his clichés. You thought it was just a movie? Nah, that was modelled off real life. I mean, here are a person or group of people that are coming off a life-altering game/match/event. It’s always life-altering: sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes mortal: you work for four years to complete for the gold and now you’ve got it… now, what? There’s got to be a lull where you don’t know what to next; what do you do when you realize that you’ve just fulfilled a dream? How do you put that kind of emotion into words???

And these are athletes. Their bodies speak for them. Their art is physical; they use their abilities in the sporting world to define them. Why do reporters expect them to talk? Honestly: what do they expect? They’ve even made the quirky athletes – like the snowboards, who have a lot of energy – look flat.

Besides, why should athletes develop grand communication skills? The reporters ask the exact same questions all the freakin’ time! You could run any interview from any post-game sports event from the last 40 years and it always has the form above. Unless it had Ali and Cosell; they’re the only exceptions. When a random athlete does say something that doesn’t fit into this form, it’s instant news; this is why Barry Bonds has to walk with a microphone up his ass this Spring… he’s left the beaten path of interviews and has something non-standard to talk about.

Lame. Just completely lame.

They need to stop doing this: it’s wasting the bandwidth that would be better used by my cable modem.