The hockey player, then-teenager Eric Lindros, was in Detroit as a member of the OHL's Oshawa Generals, his team in town to play the Detroit Junior Red Wings. He was, at the time -- 1991 -- considered the hottest NHL prospect to come down the pike in years, since a fellow by the name of Gretzky, it was said. So it was declared that he would be the focus of a press conference, although I'm not sure what the reasoning was. And judging by the look on Lindros' face, I don't think he was all that clued in, either.
But down to Joe Louis Arena we trudged, a herd of media cattle, tape recorders and cameras and notepads at the ready, wondering just what sort of enlightenment a teenaged hockey player would be providing us. Not much, as it turned out. The p.r. flacks announced the press conference was now beginning, Lindros stood at the podium, and all that was missing was a director to yell "Action!"
The silence was deafening.
After several seconds of....nothing, I asked the first question. It was known that Eric Lindros had an affinity for the Red Wings and the Toronto Maple Leafs. It was also known that neither team had a prayer of drafting him, barring a trade. Still, I asked anyway.
"Would you like to play here more often?," I said, coyly referring to his supposed desire to perhaps wear a Red Wings sweater one day.
Lindros looked right at me and said, "Sure....that would be great, to be a Red Wing."
Then more silence.
It wasn't the greatest of press conferences.
Eric Lindros
But that's also typical. If you want to find juicy tidbits of information about the subject of a press conference, then don't bother attending the press conference. You'll have the same amount of success if you simply read the release they hand out and call it a day.
Press conferences, at least when it comes to the world of sports, are to journalism what saltine crackers are to haute cuisine. They are dry and mostly tasteless. A big part of this blandness can be blamed on those of us who attend these choreographed affairs. For some reason, media types check their creativity and cahoonas at the door and put on their interrogative dunce caps. Because the questions that they ask have all the zing of mayonnaise and the toughness of Wonder bread.
Journalism 101 teaches you, or so I thought, not to ask questions that can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no", unless the situation requires it. Yet that's mainly what is asked, even by the supposedly cream of the media crop. Or if not "yes" or "no," the questions are the usual, formulaic queries that almost ensure no light will be shed on the subject matter.
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...nowadays, folks are having press conferences at the drop of a hat.
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When the Tigers hired Randy Smith as general manager after the 1995 season, we were trumpeted to an annex near Tiger Stadium to hear the new GM spout his theories of acquiring baseball talent and what changes are necessary when the players cannot throw straight or run the bases or hit their weight. The functionaries handed out a prewritten press release to us, prior to Smith's appearance. Then Smith arrived, tanned and not much past 30 years of age. All of the answers to the routine questions could be found in the press release. Apparently satisfied with those, the media in attendance didn't stray from formula at all. It was turning out to be another of those dud press conferences. Finally, I asked Smith, whose first task was to find a manager to replace Sparky Anderson, "Does the next manager have to have major league managing experience?" I didn't see that answer anywhere in the prewritten release.
Smith blinked through the lights and at the same time looked like a deer caught in them. He fumbled through an answer, unmemorable in its verbage. Apparently he wasn't very good at going off of script, either.
Some coaches have a blast with the press. The late John McKay, the first coach in the history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had some dandies. "I won't be serious with them (the press)," McKay once said. "This is their job and they want to be serious, but I won't be serious with them, because some of the questions they ask me are...asinine."
Once, after another miserable loss, a reporter asked McKay what he thought of his team's execution.
"I'm all for it," McKay replied dryly.
The late, great John McKay
Of course nowadays, folks are having press conferences at the drop of a hat. It used to be that a press conference meant some sort of huge announcement, sometimes unexpected, and always with the fun of speculation attached to it. Jerry Green wrote, in his book "The Detroit Pistons: Capturing A Remarkable Era," that he and his colleagues were bugled to the Silverdome on a dreary November afternoon in 1979. As he and his fellow reporters walked into the dome, Pistons owner Bill Davidson's private helicopter was quite visible in the parking lot.
"None of us could miss seeing it," Green wrote.
Inside the Silverdome, as the press types were arriving, Davidson was giving coach Dick Vitale the ziggy, that ancient Detroit word for a coach getting fired. Today, the firing would be leaked, probably all over the Internet, and the shock value of the press conference would plummet, dissolving into an anticlimactic announcement with the usual boring sound bites.
Today, you have clods like Terrell Owens holding "press conferences" in his driveway, as he works out on some sort of exercise machine, reporters surrounding him as if he were to have something truly important to say. That's not a press conference -- that's a photo opportunity. And everyone knows pictures tell thousands of words, so why bother with the tape recorders at those affairs?
Eric Lindros, as we all know, went on to become a pretty decent NHL player. It is presumed he got better at answering questions from the media. What isn't so certain is whether those asking the questions have improved at all.
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