You, me, and CJ McCollum

Portland Trail Blazers guard CJ McCollum woke up one February morning in a strange room in a city he doesn’t call home. His week-long “vacation” had ended, one that included a brief stay in New Orleans to be part of the All-Star festivities followed by an even briefer stay in New York.

On the day I spoke to McCollum he was in Orlando, allegedly refreshed and ready to begin a 26-game stretch to finish a season that has been at times disappointing and difficult. He was out of his hotel and bused over to the Amway Center early that morning. He then concluded a long practice before engaging in extended shooting drills from everywhere on the court. From the corners, the elbow, the top of the key, he shot and kept shooting, then free throws and floaters. He sat down for a few minutes to rest until the bus took him back to that strange, lonely room before coming back to the arena hours later to begin the process all over again.

When he sat, he asked a trainer nearby for two bags of ice, with sweat falling off his face in harmony to the rivulets of water forming along the plastic bags now wrapped around 25-year-old knees that, even after a vacation, feel decades older.

It is, of course, the perfect time for me to stick a voice recorder in his face and attempt to strike up a conversation with a man I have never met about topics that range from the unusual to the pedantic.

Part of this is due to simple logistics. The Trail Blazers are in the Western Conference and will play in Orlando only once this season, meaning this is my last and only chance to speak to any of the 15 members on Portland’s roster. Additionally, while trying to speak to McCollum in an exhausted state isn’t ideal, it represents one of three limited moments when he’ll be available, which, at best, will total one hour.

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He might speak to me for an undisclosed amount of time — say 15 minutes — following the morning shootaround, an event often subject to last-minute cancellations. There will be 30 minutes of availability before the game later that night during which a player might be shooting on the floor, stretching in the trainer’s room, eating, listening to music, talking with teammates, doling out tickets to friends and family or, potentially, simply uninterested in speaking with anyone, including media. There’s time after the game, potentially, a few minutes when said player might be just out of the shower, or in various states of undress, or rushing to get out of the locker room onto the bus, where he and his teammates will travel to the next city and repeat the cycle.

On this day in Orlando, I got lucky that McCollum was available after the morning’s shootaround.

“From a player perspective, I feel like we’re talking to you guys more than we talk to some of our family members.”

I wanted to speak with him about the nature of journalism in the NBA, or at least his perception of it. He is a current NBA player and so his opinion as someone who speaks with reporters frequently is, if nothing else, loaded with perspective. Moreover, he also graduated with a degree in journalism from Lehigh University, has written on the importance of the field on a number of occasions, and has launched a mentoring program that helps high school students interested in journalism to gain practical experience interviewing players and coaches. He is an oddity that can provide a nuanced understanding of both sides of the often dysfunctional relationship between media and athletes.

When I asked about the level of access reporters have to players, McCollum’s initial reaction was to chuckle knowingly before adding, “I think [journalists] have a lot of access, coming into the locker room 15 minutes after a game ends.” He then continued, saying “So you guys have a lot of access to get what you need, for the most part, to finish your stories, meet deadlines and stuff like that. From a player perspective, I feel like we’re talking to you guys more than we talk to some of our family members.”

McCollum’s reaction isn’t surprising and it represents the connective link between the trinity of athletes, reporters and the fans that seek both entertainment and information.

One can’t blame McCollum for believing media have too much access. I am just one of several journalists that he’ll speak to today. Soon, he will speak to a new group of intrepid, probing reporters at the Trail Blazers’ next stop, wherever that may be. His position — as a star player, as the Blazers’ starting guard or simply a NBA employee — is far more exclusive. The questions that invariably come after each game, and the person asking them, can likely blend and become indistinguishable.

“I think there are times when questions can be repetitive or are just asked in different ways even though it’s the same question,” explained McCollum about the challenges he sometimes faces when dealing with media. “It’s like…we lost the game. You watched the game. Why are you asking me why we lost? It’s tough to have to go through that process. But you have to live with it and understand it comes with the territory.”

To McCollum’s point, those questions may often seem meaningless but the reasoning behind them is valid; players inherently possess a perspective that reporters and fans never will. It’s what makes them more than just the subject of countless recaps and occasional profiles. They are also a valuable resource that helps shed light on certain aspects of the game that plays, whether justifiably or not, a significant role in the lives of so many fans.

Ultimately, it is that role, that impact, that is the driving force behind so many of those interactions that McCollum would deem pointless. Fans are driven and emotional, ravenous for any item that connects them with their chosen affiliation. Content, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will be consumed.

McCollum believes this constant output waters down the stories that are written. “I know sometimes you guys don’t even have questions and still have to get stories done. That’s the way it goes.”

This is the aspect he would be most likely to change, given the power to do so. “I don’t think we should do media every day. It’s too much, just because it gets repetitive. We’re talking about the same stuff, you guys are asking the same questions over and over again, trying to think of storylines and think of stuff and a lot of times, there’s nothing there. I think less media would be better because then when we did come together, there would be stuff to actually talk about.”

This is a slippery slope for all involved, one that has been broached publicly in 2015 by Michele Roberts, the Executive Director of the National Basketball Players Association. In an interview with Kate Fagan of espnW.com, Roberts criticized the level of access that media members possess, labeling awkward scrums in the locker room as “an incredible invasion of privacy.”

McCollum acknowledged that the interaction between journalists and athletes could be impertinent at times. Over the course of his five-year career, he’s had to deal with reporters that could get a little too personal in their line of questioning. “It happens,” he said, “but you just gotta shrug it off and keep moving.” Ultimately, McCollum believes, the power lies in a player’s hands, “I think you can answer whatever questions you want to or not want to.”

“Sometimes there’s just really nothing to talk about or write about.”

But this attitude, too, might have unintended consequences. If an athlete is short with reporters, she or he could be branded as a malcontent. One bad instance could lead to a reputation as a sour locker room presence or worse. It’s a difficult, unchartered sea to navigate through, with reporters who might be trying to write stories with depth, players who can come across as overprotective of their privacy and fans who seem to be equally content with either scenario.

“I think there could be a better balance,” said McCollum. “There’s a give and take, where you guys need stuff and fans want to hear stories and you guys’ employers want to make sure that you’re getting stuff out. Sometimes there’s just really nothing to talk about or write about.” As for blending questions related to topics both on or off the court, McCollum replied, “I think it just depends on the mood. Obviously, when you’re winning it’s a lot funner to talk about the season and things of that nature. But there’s nothing wrong with an interview that mixes it up. You don’t want to talk about basketball all the time.”

In his reply, McCollum added, perhaps unintentionally, a nuance often missing from the equation. Fans want to recognize the humanity of these god-like beings and the media sometimes does their best to provide a glimpse of that. But the line between being human or a proprietary automaton grows unacceptably too thin, particularly in troubling times marked with frequent demands of sticking-to-sports.

There’s an added bit of irony in that my conversation with McCollum took place on Feb. 23, the NBA’s Trade Deadline. It’s a complicated day for anyone involved, from the fans who work online trade machines as basement-level team executives, or the media that calls for teams to make changes without consideration for the obvious: there are people involved that will suffer as a result.

Portland’s difficult season made them a likely candidate to make changes to a roster that hasn’t always clicked. A deal was swung with the Denver Nuggets days before but, on this particular Thursday in Central Florida as I spoke with McCollum, the deadline was still hours away and a gloomy shadow still loomed large. No one on the team was safe, not superstar Damian Lillard or even McCollum himself, a duo whose ability to play alongside one another has often been questioned.

“I think you’re aware of it,” admitted McCollum of the deadline. Still, there was work to be done to turn this season around and even a potential roster upheaval couldn’t be a focal point. “But, at the end of the day, you can’t control it. You gotta go out there, try and block it out and fight through it.”

It’s a feeling that those of us on the outside, whether we hold the microphone or the next day’s morning edition, can’t process in quite the same way. The dread of knowing that everything might change from one minute to the next. “People’s families are uprooted,” said McCollum gravely. And suddenly playing the role of fantasy general managers and hypothetical trade scenarios didn’t seem like such a fun exercise, but one that was linked to real and potentially harmful implications for actual people.

Whatever line of questioning I might have wanted to direct seemed emptier after that comment from McCollum but I knew I was running out of time before the call to hop back on the bus would echo across the empty arena. I reverted to asking about the season, about trying to find a way to turn it around and the difficulties that he and his teammates might find along the way.

The questions weren’t crucial but they were all I had left because McCollum and the Blazers wouldn’t be here again for another year or more. I had to get to work on my story and McCollum had to get prepared for that night’s game and his next face-to-face with reporters.

The answers seemed to come easier for him at that point, perhaps because they required so little thought. Or maybe it’s because he had probably answered them a dozen times before.