Try to imagine being the newest person in a media scrum. You’re fairly young and wet behind the ears when it comes to all of the machinations of covering sports, especially doing so in the most competitive and obnoxious media market in the world (this is coming from a true NYC native). Despite lifelong fandom for the NFL, you only attended one game in your entire life, and it was just eight months before. You aren’t there for a well-funded prestige operation, but for a weekly newspaper that has yet to fully commit to an online presence; so just about everyone you know outside of your city will never see your work.
Did I mention that you don’t have a traditional journalism background but wrote well enough on the blogosphere for a friend of a friend to give you a shot?
This was the situation I walked into when I began a surprising seven-year odyssey as the New York Giants beat reporter for the New York Beacon, an African American themed weekly, from 2006 through 2013. I was 24 years old when both my love for sports and the need for some resume building would bring me a rare stroke of luck. Only credentialed for home games (but covered plenty more about Big Blue for seven seasons), there are countless days and nights that someone who grew up a San Francisco 49ers fan will always cherish. Yet despite covering a team that would win two Super Bowls during that period, there are two moments that proved to be foundational to me on a professional and personal level. They were thanks to the newly minted head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders and the Giants’ former middle linebacker, Antonio Pierce.
In 2006, New York had a true Jekyll-and-Hyde season where it started off hot at 6-2 before falling apart at the seams with a 2-6 record to finish at 8-8 and barely make the playoffs. Eli Manning had the expected difficulties in his first full season as the starting quarterback and the defense did all it could to keep games competitive despite major injuries. That year was a major learning curve for yours truly as well, not so much in terms of delivering copy on time, but in building confidence to actually talk to the players. It may be something that everyone else in the media gaggle was trained for (an ability, in my opinion, many take for granted), but that wasn’t the case with me. It’s far more intimidating than it appears – as a reporter, your job is to actually observe, analyze and often critique someone else’s job, one that you couldn’t do to save your life!
In Week 4, the Giants were feeling pretty good about themselves after beating division rival Washington. About 20 minutes into the postgame press conference, Pierce came to talk to those of us who hadn’t ventured into the locker room. Reporters from the bigger outlets did their usual jumping all over each other to get their questions out, and at that very moment after two home games of nervous silence, I finally said “screw it” to ask something that piqued my curiosity during the game itself.
Pierce tactfully picked out which reporters to respond to, with some scribes leaving their hands down because they were going to ask the same questions. As I finally had the stones to speak, another reporter beat me to the punch. Yet the soon-to-be Pro Bowler made a subtle gesture that showed how much respect he commanded from everyone in the room. As if he was spying the wide receiver in motion while keeping an eye on the quarterback, he shot me a quick glance while answering her question. When done, it felt as if the entire room was cleared for me to talk. Though I don’t recall what I asked, I remembered getting a great quote that I included in my article for the upcoming paper.
From that point on, I consistently spoke up at press conferences, interacted with players in the locker room, and was even able to get a funny story or two off the record. (Of course, the one time I didn’t ask a question in a presser, I went viral.)
Pierce always left an impression as someone who approached the game in a cerebral manner to make up for the fact that he wasn’t the fastest “Mike” or the most athletic. That was something I kept in mind almost two years later when covering a Giants’ preseason game in 2008. For the first time in NFL history, defensive captains were equipped with headsets in their helmets, allowing them to finally enjoy the advantage that quarterbacks had for ages. It was a whole new world in how defensive coaches could communicate with their charges, one that gave them a level playing field despite all the rule tweaks in favor of more offense.
After that game, a gaggle of reporters came to Pierce’s locker to ask him about his brief time on the field, thoughts on some of his new teammates, and all the other stuff that comes with preseason football. Yet it seemed as if they all completely ignored that he was given the new headset, so I asked him about that experience. Pierce, and many of his peers throughout the NFL, had played the game one way since they were in Pop Warner for there to be this sudden and career-altering change dropped into their laps. This might have been the first time he was asked about it by anyone in the media, because he gave a detailed answer on how he was trying to use training camp and his brief preseason action to get used to hearing a voice in his helmet.
When the gaggle dispersed, I went back to him to thank him for what he did for me two years ago, something he remembered and appreciated.
Athletes have an interesting relationship with the media that covers them. There’s necessity, acrimony, and jocularity all mixed in a pot, served to the public for easy consumption. I wasn’t someone that players and coaches remembered by name or media outlet, but they knew my face and approach. Trying to flex my knowledge of the game wasn’t in the job description but trying to articulate what they aimed to do every Sunday was. As a Black writer in the overwhelmingly white media in New York, the relationship I had with players and coaches was always going to be different than those of better-known peers. Quite a few of the players felt more comfortable speaking to me than others. (To borrow from the new head coach of the New England Patriots, Jerod Mayo, we saw color even when others chose not to.)
For years, a big part of me had assumed Pierce was conscious of that when he spied me in that 2006 presser or when he shared some deeper knowledge in 2008. : “Maybe our shared ethnicity didn’t play much of a role at all and that was part of his gregarious nature as a professional football player. However, those gestures seem to reflect the coach that the Raiders needed during the 2023 NFL season, taking over for the disaster that was Josh McDaniels. Many in the Raiders orbit have talked about how Pierce has empowered his assistants and renewed confidence in the players. That he has done so as the rare Black interim head coach to get the full-time job shouldn’t be lost on anyone in and around the NFL.
Because all these years later, it’s never been lost on me.
