I can’t remember who said it, but when Sally McLellan won silver in the 100m hurdles at the Bejiing Olympics, someone described her joyful reaction as what sports stars sound like when they haven’t had any media training.
There was none of that tedium about taking it one hurdle at a time, about sticking to the strategy, no irritating thank-yous for her sponsors (if indeed she had any), no psychobabble about self-belief and running the mental race. Rather we saw pure, unadorned joy, with the odd expletive thrown in for extra colour.
“Oh my God, is this real? You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” McLellan said. “Did you see me? Did you see how pumped I was? I was more pumped than I’ve ever been in my life. Shit, I could see a girl passing me but kept running my own race. Amazing. I can’t believe it.”
There was nothing stage-managed or contrived or affected about McLellan’s reaction, and it made the nation love her all the more. So much so that she’s unlikely to join the ranks of the often-forgotten silver medallists, and will remain burned in our brains for acting like such an engaging and normal human being.
At the other end of the sincerity spectrum, obviously as a result of spectacularly different circumstances, the sporting world has now given us Tiger Woods.
Woods’ attempt to apologise and atone for his extraordinary level of philandering has been widely condemned as contrived. It certainly made for rivetting television. Not so much for what he said, but for how he said it, as it had obviously been so rehearsed, no doubt with the assistance of a highly-paid team of spin doctors and crisis managers, that it was like watching some shockingly bad acting from The Bold and The Beautiful, rather than a real person talking openly about the poor choices he had (repeatedly) made.
Even the pauses and silences and the direct, baleful stare into the camera when he mentioned his wife looked like they’d been work-shopped with a stopwatch to calibrate the maximum level of dramatic effect.
As a result, it didn’t work at all.
It was compounded by his refusal to take any questions. (Think back to Matthew Johns last year. While I would never try to defend Johns for what he did with that young girl, he at least had the strength of character to confess to his wife, then front up for an extraordinarily harrowing interview on A Current Affair, facing the music alone as the other cowards who were with him at that New Zealand hotel room chose to remain anonymous.)
The sincerity of Woods’ statement was also undermined by his massively inflated sense of his own importance in the lives of his fans. Basically, Tiger Woods is good at hitting a little ball with a long stick, and even the most passionate golf fan can keep it in perspective. You would have to doubt whether everyone who owns a Woods-branded Nike swoosh shirt, or a golf ball with his name on it, is lying awake in tears asking how Tiger could have betrayed them so. The only person who would really be doing that is poor Mrs Woods.
The podium apology has now become a defining feature of modern life. The one saving grace was that Woods at least didn’t rope his long-suffering wife into his public statement.
A more conciliatory person might counter that people such as Woods are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. You could argue that it’s impossible to get the balance right. Certainly, it is possible to say sorry so often that you don’t sound sorry anymore - where it starts to sound not like you’re sorry for what you did, just sorry that you’ve been busted and your world has caved in.
But if you’re going to convince a cynical world that you are genuinely contrite for your actions, the biggest challenge is to get your language and delivery right.
And it’s here where the Tiger Woods press conference now stands as the high watermark of spin and message-management.
The language, and the repeated apologies, created the impression that Woods was largely trying to rehabilitate himself so he can keep his sponsors happy and start swinging the wrenches again. The delivery was so twee and manipulative that the words were almost redundant.
The public is well and truly on to the great con that has been perpetrated by spin doctors the world over. Outplacement consultants talking about rightsizing or downsizing as they cut a swathe through company headcounts, economists and bankers talking about upward shifts in prices or interest rates, and the kind of stage-managed self-flagellation Woods displayed on Saturday morning…so much has now been done to strip words of their true meaning that any public figure will now come unstuck at their first use of contrived or evasive language.
There’s a lesson in this for everyone in public life, and it is that people are quite happy to see someone who is famous or in a position of authority who isn’t permanently slick, polished or “on message”, to borrow from the lexicon of modern politics.
Kevin Rudd’s difficulties a couple of weeks ago with those meddling kids on the ABC’s Q and A program stemmed not just from the content of his answers, but the words he used to couch his answers. All those rhetorical questions to himself, and refrains such as “at the end of the day”, “there’s no magic wand” - it was just strange to watch. This isn’t the way the guy talks in real life but he came across like he was trying so hard to remember his lines, not to have a normal human conversation, that he immediately got himself quite badly stuck.
There is a lot to be said for being yourself. Just think of the money our political parties could save, and which companies could spend on things of value to their employees and their shareholders, if we pulled back some way from the modern cult of spin and issues management, which reached something of an apex at 3am on Saturday morning.
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