This Coach Gives Professional Athletes Help In Handling Reporters' Questions -- Andrea Kirby Teaches How To Avoid Blunders

PRINCETON, N.J. - You are a professional athlete earning millions, and you just blew the game. Afterward at your locker, embarrassed, angry and desperate to be somewhere else, you are questioned about the blunder.

This is how you would like to respond: "Look, you little pencil-toting geek, if you'd ever pull yourself away from the free lunch in the press box, maybe you'd understand something about this game. You're worse than our idiot fans. Now get away from my locker before I turn your ugly face into hamburger."

That felt good, didn't it? Well, guess what? You just cost yourself a hefty fine, the goodwill of the fans, and your Stupendous Shoes endorsement. And reporters? They are camped outside your house now, waiting for your reaction to your overreaction.

Here's what the savvy superstar would have said: "I wish I had a good explanation, guys. But, as you all know so well, these things happen in our game. I can tell you this, though. If that situation comes up again, I'm going to do my best to ensure that the result will be different."

So what if he swallowed his pride and bit through his lower lip? So what if his words were bland and slightly disingenuous? His multimillion-dollar endorsements are safe. He kept the columnists and sports-radio callers off his back. And he made his media coach very, very happy.

The fragile juxtaposition of sports, money and media has created one more unpleasant reality for the modern athlete: First it was the agent. Now it's the media coach.

Missteps affect the bottom line

"The media is part of the goose that laid the golden egg," said Norm Charlton, the former Phillies reliever now with Seattle. "Stories create interest, which attracts fans. Our job is not just to play ball."

While this trend might be producing more self-assured athletes such as Charlton, some would suggest that by attempting to eliminate outbursts, it also has stripped sports of some appealing candor.

"Of course, you would rather see that honest reaction - anger or frustration - from athletes," said Joseph Turow, professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania. "But that's against their best interest, and more and more they are realizing that. These missteps that a number of athletes have had takes away from their value as marketable commodities."

The media-coach movement began a decade or so ago, when the Mets, Phillies and a few other baseball teams hired former broadcaster Andrea Kirby to consult with their young players. With burgeoning media scrutiny, they reasoned, it was essential that these expensive investments be able to handle themselves, be able to, in Kirby's words, "design the results."

Gradually, as the Information Age flowered and the financial risks for athletes increased, the rest of sports caught on.

The NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball now make media training mandatory for rookies. Teams submit not only players but their executives to the sessions. Big-salaried stars such as the Sixers' Jerry Stackhouse, tennis' Pete Sampras and golf's John Daly retain personal media advisers. And before the '96 Olympic Games, the entire U.S. team was put through a Kirby course.

"We felt it was imperative," said Mike Moran, a U.S. Olympic Committee spokesman. "What they say and how they appear can have a huge impact on the rest of their lives."

Firms such as Kirby's Atlanta-based Andrea Kirby Coaches Inc. and the LeMaster Group in Dallas - the two largest - now counsel much of the major-professional sports world, with fees running as high as $10,000 for a two-day program. Some clubs and individuals pay an annual retainer for their on-call services.

Admit your mistakes

"I've had some athletes that have gotten themselves in big trouble," Kirby said. "A team will call and say, `So-and-so did this or said this and everybody is up in arms.' My first and foremost advice is, `If you've made a mistake, you must say that.' Sometimes I talk it through with them on the phone. I try to get them to forget what they think they want to say and, instead, to say what they really feel. They think the truth can't possibly be appropriate."

Kirby, who pretty much invented the industry after watching Georgetown's Patrick Ewing struggle through a New York news conference in 1984, was in Princeton recently to address the Nike Camp's assembled high-school basketball talent.

She taught these teenage athletes what she teaches her older and richer clients: how to deal comfortably with all the cameras, microphones and notebooks that soon will be thrust in their faces, and, more interestingly for many of them, how to turn those reporters into their personal marketers.

"You know what athletes get for it (cordial media relations)?" asked Kirby, a stylish Alabaman who had been a TV sportscaster before she had her locker-room epiphany. "Big bucks."

It's not always an instant conversion. Even Kirby claims she reaches only about 60 percent of those she works with. Macho stubbornness and peer pressure still prevail in locker rooms. She recalled the rookie whom the Mets stuck at a locker between Vince Coleman and Eddie Murray, two veterans notoriously antagonistic to reporters.

"That kid didn't have a chance," said Kirby, who didn't name the player but said he no longer was in baseball. "He ended up acting just like those guys. . . . Now, you don't want them all to be vanilla. Look at Charles Barkley. He says outrageous things, but he's willing to pay for it. He has decided to take responsibility for what he says. Some guys say things, then act like they're victims."

Privately, media coaches everywhere must have been delighted recently when Fuzzy Zoeller's racially insensitive remarks about Tiger Woods revealed the costly pitfalls of a bad interview. The golfer lost lucrative endorsements and withdrew from several tournaments.

"I wasn't there, so I don't know what happened," Kirby said, employing one of the evasive tactics she teaches. "But I can say that golf was not ready for the kind of scrutiny it's now getting. With Tiger being so big, suddenly everybody is listening to every syllable."

Kirby pointed to the Phillies' Lenny Dykstra as an example of an athlete who, after some initial reluctance as a young Met, eventually embraced her message.

"He couldn't see it at first, but after a while the lightbulbs went off. Lenny finally realized that if you give them something interesting, they'll go away and leave you alone. And they'll also write something that makes you look good. And Lenny always wanted the extra endorsements," she said.

These consultants serve a useful function for many athletes, making a potentially harrowing experience safe and palatable for them. But increasingly in the sports' fishbowl, athletes, having witnessed the verbal missteps of Zoeller and others, are wary of the media.

"The player has changed," said Kirby, who conducted her first workshop in 1985, with the Mets. "They're more scared and they're more angry. They've seen people ruined, and they think that's automatically how it's going to be for anybody who talks with the press. So a lot of them have drawn back into themselves. And that's where the cliches come from. They keep it all in until they explode. But the fact is there are other options."

Look 'em in the eye

Kirby counsels athletes to make eye contact with interviewers, to establish relationships, and to provide the kind of interesting stories that make reporters happy and athletes rich.

"What she tells you are things you don't always think about," said the Phillies' Mickey Morandini, who took a Kirby course several years ago. "But every once in a while a little light goes on and you remember something she said. She showed us this film of David Cone, about how terrible he was with reporters at first. Then she showed him now, and he was great. That made an impression. You can change and help yourself."

There is the danger, however, that, as in politics, the relationship between athletes and the media is being reduced to self-serving sound bites. Like politicians, players are being managed and manipulated. What the fans are getting from them is truth filtered through their personal needs. And their greatest need, said Penn's Turow, is not always telling the truth but creating marketable personas.

"A lot of them think, `OK, if someone asks me a question, I've got to answer it.' I tell them, `The president goes through his whole term answering about 50 percent of his questions. Why should you be different? It's America,"' said Kirby. "I believe it's the athletes' responsibility to decide whether they are going to shoot themselves in the foot."

Do not, however, take the political analogy too far. Do not call media coaches "spin doctors" or suggest they are creating locker rooms filled with cliche-spewing, emotionless jocks, Kirby said.

"These athletes have never been taught to think like a responsible person," Kirby said. "I'm not recommending they don't show emotion ever. What I am recommending is that "they" get to decide what emotions they show. If they feel disappointment or anger, that's OK, too. But they need to know that whatever they decide, they are responsible for the consequences.

"The most obvious thing the people I work with change is their attitudes. They don't all go out and become vastly interesting. But they learn to open up and give more of what's in their heads," she said. "I don't tell them what to say. I just have one little method I use that allows them not to answer something they don't want to answer."

Toronto Raptors Coach Darrell Walker wishes he had learned that method sooner. After a loss in which Damon Stoudamire had a horrible night, Walker was asked why his point guard shot so much. The rookie coach exploded with an obscenity-laced tirade. Kirby was summoned.

"You ask a negative question, and these guys don't know how to handle it. They take it personally," she said. "Darrell was embarrassed when I showed him himself on tape. We spent two days with him. Finally, he figured it all out. When I asked him, `Why "does" he shoot so much?' he said, `Well, the guy just likes to shoot."'

It was, said Kirby, the right answer. Not, however, the most interesting one.

"If they don't want to show that they're a horse's ass," she said, "they don't have to."