The passing of industry giant Chris Mortensen produced reams of tributes both inside and outside of journalism, in part because Mortensen had developed such longtime relationships with coaches, GMs, owners and power brokers – but most of all with the athletes he covered.
So it shouldn’t shock anyone that athletes as different as Peyton Manning and Michael Vick were quick to praise Mortensen, who was taken by throat cancer at age 72. They actually knew the journalist, and he actually knew them.
In some ways, then, we’re not only mourning the loss of a great reporter and a good man. We’re also thinking back wistfully on an era of media relations that no longer exists in sports – and it’s to the absolute detriment of every team that follows the idiotic advice that has led to this corrosion.
Mortensen, known by friends as Mort, had great relationships with many of his story subjects partly because he came of age in a journalistic era in which that could happen. This was before the iron curtain came down between teams and the people who cover them.
Like most sportswriters who broke in during the 1980s or ‘90s, Mort had substantially free rein to do his job. He had what would today be considered wild levels of access to the locker room, clubhouse, pre- and post-game scenes, batting practice (during his time as an MLB writer) and more. Casual conversations, most often with no notes taken, later begat better stories.
And it wasn’t only a matter of building trust, which is always the job of the journalist and never the job of the team. When reporters and their subjects spend more time together, the people being written or spoken about feel there’s a level of accountability that they can access.
If they don’t like something, they can let the person responsible know what they’re thinking. Even if it doesn’t change the result, it can deepen the professional relationship. It’s almost never a waste of time.
But the access that would foster such a relationship has been systematically choked down to almost nothing. A strain of badly conceived P.R. and marketing strategies has led franchises into ever-increasing levels of paranoia about who’s covering them and what they’re saying, and they’ve chosen to cower rather than walk upright.
Mortensen’s life work is a great time to remind teams (and their owners) to step back. Mort’s career reflected the best of relationship-building. Aside from the Patriots’ Deflate Gate episode, the man’s body of work was practically flawless. If any of us gets through a full career with one single major gaffe, we’re living right.
But Mortensen knew people. He took the time and put in the work. Again, that is a reporter’s responsibility, but it has become incrementally more difficult in an era in which teams – almost all teams, in almost all sports – have decided that the best way to guard the news about them is to make access to information and people almost impossible.
The smart move upon the advent of social media would’ve been to use this incredibly valuable new tool to augment what fans know about teams, not restrict it. But that’s not what happened. Social media is now used as a dodge.
The P.R.-driven decision to take teams’ information internal has done absolutely nothing to elevate those brands. Nor has the bizarre practice of making even assistant coaches off limits to reporters in the name of accurate messaging. Too, keeping players cloistered by restricting when they may be addressed speaks to a deep dysfunction in basic human relations.
The easiest thing to do, for teams, is pull up those covers. It’s a massive mistake, and that mistake begins with the basic misunderstanding of the dynamics of fandom. Most folks watch games because they’re interested in other human beings doing cool things. There is no planet upon which that dynamic is enhanced by making it harder for us to get to know the athletes.
Chris Mortensen played at the highest levels, and he certainly broke his share of stories that were purely numbers-driven. He had new signings and record contract deals, just as Adam Schefter does today. He was deeply conversant with agents. It’s part of the gig.
But Mortensen loved to write about players and coaches and strategies, too. And the only way to do that effectively is the way he did it, by getting to know the people involved well enough that they’d trust him to tell a really interesting story. All sportswriters and great broadcasters through the modern history of games have used that formula. You’ve got to start with trust.
Mort would have a hard time initiating that trust-building process if he were starting out today, because at every turn he’d be met by a team regulation that says, basically, We’re not interested in helping you get to know anybody. It’s the strangest, most self-defeating way to operate a people business. May wiser heads prevail.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
