Ah, March. That time of year when even those who don’t know the difference between a blocking foul and a backcourt violation pretend to be interested in college basketball so that they can fill out a bracket and join the office pool—which almost inevitably ends up being won by Suzie from Accounting who picked her winners based on their uniform colors.
For a nerd, I have an almost unseemly interest in sports, one I suspect that most of my readers do not share. But don’t worry, this post isn’t actually about the basketball tournament. Instead, it’s about a press conference at the tournament, nearly 10 years ago now. Sports press conferences in general are even more boringly predictable than political press conferences. In fact, they tend to be so predictable that recently a number of sportscasters admitted that, if they can’t manage to interview the coach before they go on the air, they just make up what he said—and nine times out of ten, they’re probably right.
But every now and then, you get something interesting out of them. Such was the case during this press conference on March 21, 2015. A number of players for the Wisconsin Badgers, including one named Nigel Hayes, had been made available to the media for questions. And this happened:
Question: Nigel…you’ve taken quite a leap in 3-point shooting…. Can you describe…the steps you took…to raise those parts of your game?
Nigel: Before I answer that question, I would like to say a few words: cattywampus, onomatopoeia, and antidisestablishmentarianism. Now, back to your question, it was just a lot of hard work, teammates giving you great confidence….
Those clearly were not the words that anyone was expecting, and led to a bit of confusion as everyone tried to mentally rewrite their predetermined narratives to account for them. The original questioner asked for clarification, and Nigel explained that his words were directed towards the stenographer:
Nigel: She does an amazing job of typing words, but sometimes if words are not in her dictionary, maybe if I say soliloquy right now, she may have to work a little bit harder to type that word. Or quandary, zephyr, or xylophone, things like that make her job really interesting.
It turned out that, the night before, after their game, Nigel and some of his teammates had been wandering around the tournament site, and they ran into the stenographer. They were interested in what she was doing, and she showed them how her machine worked, how she had shortcuts for pretty much all the standard words that she expected them to say, allowing her to keep up with their speech. But what if they said something she didn’t have a short cut for? Well, she would have to type that manually. So Nigel decided to do a bit of affectionate trolling at his next opportunity and find out how good she really was.
Tying this back to the point of the blog, I’ve been thinking about this story recently and why it is that it still sticks in my mind after nearly a decade. I’ve decided that there are two reasons.
First, there’s the sheer WTFery of the moment. As I said above, sport press conferences are predictable. And this one started out that way, then went straight off into left field…and then came back to the expected place. Nigel’s answer about his three-point shooting is one of those answers that the reporter could easily have written without ever actually asking Nigel about it. There was just that one moment that was so weird, one moment so brief you might almost wonder if you’d imagined it.
The other reason, though, was the fact that this story is in fact a story. There is an interesting explanation for Nigel’s weird comment, and it leads into a discussion about how players experience the tournament when they aren’t playing, some of the people involved in the production that you might not have thought about, and what happened when those people meet up.
The lesson is that I take from this is that WTF? moments can be extremely effective, but in order to make them so, you need both of the things I mentioned above. First, you need to make sure that your reader recognizes them as WTF? moments. If something went horribly…well, cattywampus…in your fantasy ritual, but the reader doesn’t know what the ritual was supposed to be like, it will fall flat. The other thing you need is an explanation: after you make the reader go, “Wait, what?” you have to give him a context in which this all makes sense. Without that explanation, it’s just a random thing that happened, and random things don’t stick in the mind the way that stories do.