Once sports people realized that most of what they said would be accessible in video form on the internet forever, the era of the publicly interesting player/coach/executive began to wither.
The people who still provide killer material deliver it like a script. Probably because it is one.
I was thinking this as I read a softball interview with Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, in the Times of London over the weekend.
When it rolled around to the only question anyone cared about, Alwyn delivered an anodyne 128-word answer that he had to start twice to get right.
That’s a trained actor after having had weeks to prepare. A successful hockey coach talks nearly every day for eight or nine months, and is almost always relying on his wits.
No wonder most of them sound like they’re recording a hostage video in their second language.
Most of them, except for Paul Maurice.
For a lot of years, the current Panthers head coach carried the worst reputation a hockey coach can have – as an egghead. Worst in that it guarantees that you will continue to be hired because you are a safe choice, but that no one will ever embrace you because you were a safe choice.
In Toronto in particular, Maurice came off like a guy smart enough to understand he was one wrong verb tense away from lighting the franchise on fire. Which is to say, too smart for his own good.
He was similarly afflicted in Winnipeg. It’s only in Florida, in his mid-fifties, that he has … ‘unleashed’ is the wrong word. Maurice would never use that word. Invited is better. Invited the beast.
Unbound by the game’s weird rules around who is allowed to say what and when and how, Maurice has become the most interesting man in hockey. On some nights, his six or seven minutes behind the mic are more fun than the 2 1/2 hours that preceded them.
Here he is when asked a leading question, mid-game, about Florida’s goonishness: “Nobody’s been arrested yet.”
After berating his players on the bench: “I just thought they needed some profanity in their lives.”
On being eliminated: “If you lose that last game, you don’t care if the plane goes down, right?”
If a Leafs or Oilers coach were to say it, even the most cynical media hacks would buy pearls, just so they could clutch them in print. That’s how the clicks game works. But when Maurice does it, people don’t bother. They know there’s no point.
What are the Panthers going to do? Fire him? ‘Thanks for all your memeable moments and Stanley Cup appearances. We’re going to go with someone much less likely to interest our 400 fans.’
Nobody tells you when you start out that the thing you should aspire to at your job is a state of meditative apathy. That’s not to say that you don’t care. It’s that you have stopped caring about how you are going over.
You are no longer working; you are being. This is the point at which craft can sometimes become art.
Maurice has reached that magical level in Florida. The franchise has no weight of history, so he’s free to fill a lot of empty space. Management has taken the unusual roster approach of hiring only full-grown adults, so the players seem happy to let him say what he likes.
Floridians must assume all hockey coaches talk like European soccer coaches – in full sentences, with disarming humour, reinforced by illustrative anecdotes.
If there were to be a real-life Ted Lasso, Maurice could be the top current candidate. He’d be the one guy who understands that wisdom is knowing that you don’t know, as well as who first said that.
After the Oilers laid the Panthers out in Game 4, Maurice was back at it. A blowout loss in a series you have no choice but to win is a tough spot in which to speak. It’s not like anybody’s got much practice at it. Too glib and you seem cocky, which makes the players nervous. Too concerned and you seem scared, which makes the players nervous.
Maurice’s post-game presser was a master class in tension release. Same relaxed tone. Same downturned muppet mouth. Same jokes.
“Not a lot of silver linings here, people,” Maurice said. “But [pulled goalie Sergei] Bob[rovsky] got some rest.”
This isn’t just about wit. It’s about delivery. Maurice has a deadpan that would make Dirty Harry-era Clint Eastwood look hysterical.
Some coaches – Bill Belichick leaps to mind – take dispassion into the realm of hauteur. It’s amusing, but not likeable.
Maurice’s blankness is open hearted. He wants everyone in on the joke. Though he is smarter than you, he doesn’t need you to feel it.
“I’ll fire out at least one cliché for you, so you have something there – we came into Edmonton to get a split. We got what we needed,” Maurice told reporters on Sunday night. That is a very meta line under the circumstances.
To the average onlooker, it is very difficult to tell what makes a good coach, aside from rings on fingers. Under extreme pressure, they’ve all learned to start blurting out Xs and Os talk in the hopes of baffling their audience.
But does any of this work on the players? Is any of it making teams better? You watch any of the behind-the-scenes docs and a lot of NHL coaching appears to be using the f-word as often as possible at maximum volume.
We are told over and over again that this or that guy is a great coach right after he’s been fired for the fourth time. If he’s so great, why don’t you want him any more? No one ever answers that one.
But once in a while, you hear a coach talk and you think to your non-athletic self, “I wouldn’t mind it if he/she was my boss.” That’s the mark of a great coach – someone who appears leaderly to anyone who’s listening, not just the initiated.
Nobody in the NHL seems more with it, more clued in, or more leaderly right now than Paul Maurice, and it’s not just that his team is winning.
It’s that in a world full of men pulled tighter than piano wire, he’s the one guy who always seems to be having fun at work.