The public has the right to know

December 3, 2000 by neil manthorp

Neil Man­thorp ‑  03/12/2000

It may seem odd to respond to a fel­low colum­nist with a col­umn of my own, espe­cial­ly giv­en the fact that Dave Richard­son and I have spent the first four days of the Port Eliz­a­beth Test match work­ing in adjoin­ing com­men­tary box­es. We do talk, and yes, we have dis­cussed the con­tents of his lat­est col­umn which appears along­side this one.

As expect­ed of an attor­ney and a man with his sen­si­tiv­i­ty and under­stand­ing of sport and peo­ple, there is noth­ing that can be suc­cess­ful­ly dis­put­ed in his col­umn. He is, of course, quite cor­rect in his asser­tion that sports­men are also peo­ple and deserve to have their pri­va­cy as much as the rest of us.

I have two ques­tions, how­ev­er. Does the man who pays his mon­ey at the gate deserve to hear what the man who scores a cen­tu­ry has to say about his innings? I think he does.

Does the man who pays his mon­ey for his dai­ly news­pa­per deserve to hear what the sports­man has to say or should he have to read what the jour­nal­ist has to say, day after day. It does­n’t mat­ter how good a writer is, or how enter­tain­ing his copy is, he does not — and can­not — rep­re­sent the feel­ings of a man who has scored a hun­dred or won a Test match.

The sec­ond ques­tion is this: do nation­al sports­men feel they are talk­ing to Col­in Bry­den, Peter Robin­son, Trevor Chester­field or any oth­er indi­vid­ual jour­nal­ist when they answer ques­tions in a press con­fer­ence or have they been remind­ed that they are, in fact, talk­ing the hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple who watch and fol­low crick­et in South Africa and through­out the world?

A final thought, also in ref­er­ence to Dav­e’s col­umn. How would a busi­ness exec­u­tive react if he found a used con­dom on his desk when he arrived for work? Is a sport­ing dress­ing room not a place of work? If the used con­dom found in the Spring­bok rug­by dress­ing room caused suf­fi­cient dis­gust to dis­rupt and divide the squad, would that not con­sti­tute ‘news’?

As David says in his col­umn, some sports­men do still regard the media as the ene­my. But that atti­tude will nev­er pre­vail because, ulti­mate­ly, the media are dri­ven by you, the consumers.