This post is not about football, but football is the backdrop to it. Don’t worry, though: even if you’re not into sportsball it will be interesting. This weekend, randomly, a new American Football league started, trying to compete with the NFL. In an effort to be interesting, one of the changes that they made was radically opening up the field to the reporters and the on-site commentators. There have always been brief halftime interviews of the head coach on the way to the locker room, but this is way more extreme. A few times, a guy would make a great play - or a terrible one - and immediately some commentator would be talking to him on the sideline about what just happened. Sometimes the poor guy would be panting still. Most of the time the players tried to be cool about it. They are, after all, paid performers to some extent. And I’m not saying there’s anything ethically or morally wrong with this. But I could tell it really annoyed the players and coaches and, honestly, I felt for them. Few of us have been professional football players I would imagine, but we’ve all tried to do our job while somebody stood there and, well, made themselves a pest. I remember many years ago working at a large video game company and having the CEO call me directly and ask me how things were going. The temptation to say “they’d be going better if you stopped calling me” was nearly overwhelming.
There’s something grating about having somebody in your face when you’re trying to get something done. It’s like the opposite of a flow state; an “anti-flow” state, if you will. The more we get interrupted, the more annoying it gets until, at some point, we just lose our cool.
I, for one, don’t want sideline reporters interviewing the guy at the circus who just got off the trapeeze or the lady who just finished singing an aria.