Lanai, Hawaii —
Some professional athletes like to claim that reporters covering their sport can’t really understand it because they never played the game at the highest level. Oh really? This is one conceit that needs to exit stage right.
Sure, somebody who has played professional basketball, for example, might well understand the game better than those of us who never played in the NBA or WNBA. That said, they simply don’t have the exclusive license on expertise.
If experiencing something firsthand is a requirement for true expertise, then there would be no experts on Mars and Venus, distant galaxies, animals, dinosaurs, and the history of humankind prior to the 20th Century.
This same logic means one would have to be a top chef or at least a superb home cook to review restaurants well, run for public office or served on a campaign to cover politics effectively, or worked as a broker, trader, or financial analyst to report on Wall Street with precision. I don’t think so.
The best journalists, authors, scientists, and analysts know how to build deep, highly credible reservoirs of knowledge in just about every form of human endeavor. It’s what they are trained and educated to do. It’s called learning and it’s earned by endless reading, questioning, listening, observing, and, yes, participating in the activity if and as possible.
Clearly, advantages accrue from high-level, personal experience. Former Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo, for example, is as fine an analyst on NFL broadcasts as I have ever seen. The late Jonathan Gold was a superb home cook, too, and as brilliant a restaurant reviewer as we have known.
Still, it’s worth noting that firsthand experience at the highest levels can also blind people who later analyze and report on these subjects. They risk getting locked into frameworks and approaches that may have worked for them at a given time, but could actually be antithetical to understanding the sport or the science today. It’s really just another version of the expert’s dilemma.
Image courtesy of Claromentis.