![]() ![]() players Ryan Whitney and Paul Bissonnette, and helped launch a popular series by the former N.F.L. The controversial, bro-centric media company Barstool Sports produces “Spittin’ Chiclets,” featuring the former N.H.L. The wrestler Chris Jericho hosts a surprisingly brisk interview show, “Talk Is Jericho,” with regular appearances from the Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan. The more polished shows can feel like extended auditions for media jobs, full of the rhythms and recurring segments of mainstream sports talk. The space where athletes-or male athletes, at least-have found the greatest success as storytellers is in podcasting. ![]() Now they barely had to settle for sports at all. Its aim was to produce content from players’ points of view, and to show that those players could be “more than an athlete.” People like Jeter and James no longer had to settle for being talking heads. Around the time that Jeter launched the Tribune, LeBron James got funding for a new company, Uninterrupted. And athletes everywhere are seizing the means of production. Retired greats have realized that they possess endless content-stories, memories, behind-the-scenes morsels-that fans crave. ![]() Players have grown infatuated with sharing their perspectives in real time, in direct, unfiltered ways. But the Internet, which allows any of us to air the slightest thought, has changed those rules. If they aspired to work in media, they would try to land a cushy network job, providing expert commentary or analysis. In the past, if athletes wanted to speak candidly, they would write a tell-all book, do a sit-down interview, maybe phone in to a radio show. Triumphs were flecked with pain or self-doubt stars openly shared their traumas. The Tribune helped popularize a wider range of athlete stories. In 2017, Dion Waiters, a player renowned for his astronomical level of self-regard, cemented his legend with an essay about his scrappy upbringing, titled “The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Articles.” The All-Star forward Kevin Love wrote about struggling with depression. The appeal of the site as a space for storytelling, and the extent to which it was disrupting traditional flows of information, became hard to ignore. The following year, Kevin Durant revealed his free-agency decision there. In 2015, Kobe Bryant announced his retirement by publishing a poem in the Tribune. But Jeter’s peers began to understand the allure of speaking on their own terms, and in their own voice. Most imagined that the site would be little more than a place for tight-lipped players to issue elegant press statements. The site, he explained, would give athletes a chance to speak directly to fans, who deserved “more than ‘no comments’ or ‘I don’t knows.’ ” Naturally, these were just the types of answers that he was known for.Īt first, it was a bit funny, the notion of Jeter hounding athletes for their delinquent essays. As a player, Jeter had always been a polite but almost pathologically reserved presence, offering the media pro-forma pleasantries, deflecting deeper inquiries into his personal life. ![]() In October, 2014, three days after Derek Jeter played the last game of his Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees, he launched the Players’ Tribune, a Web site for athletes to tell their side of the story. ![]()
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