The more we’ve seen Mo’ne Davis out there as a moneymaker for the sports media this last week, the more we become tempted to leap in with protective shield, acknowledge that things are moving too fast and try to restore some sanity.
But then this 13-year-old street-smart kid from South Philly throws us a curve on the level of Clayton Kershaw.
When asked by her hometown Philadelphia Daily News if the media attention following her around as she competes in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Penn., is getting in the way of her being normal, she responded: “It is kind of creepy.”
She repeated to Sports Illustrated, who made her a cover girl in many parts of the country with their Aug. 25 issue: “All of the interviews and the autographs and people who wanted me to take pictures, it’s kind of taking away the fun. People were like, ‘Oh, there’s going to be people running up to you taking pictures,’ and I thought it was going to be a bunch of kids. But it’s grown-ups! And that’s, like, creepy.”
Especially the dozens currently taking to eBay.com to sell a variation of her autograph on a baseball.
If the media seems to be creeping up on Davis, she’s been somehow ready for it.
After she had just pitched a 4-0 win over Tennessee in a tournament opening game last Friday — the first time a girl had thrown a shutout on this stage — ESPN reporter Jaymee Sire her if it was difficult to not be blinded by this new spotlight.
“Not really,” Davis said rather bluntly. “I can always say ‘no,’ so that’s like my special weapon for the media.”
Normar Garciaparra said he saw that and laughed out loud.
“Wow, that’s probably the same answer I would have given — not as a 13-year-old but when I was playing,” the former Dodgers All-Star working his fifth straight year as an ESPN analyst for the Little League World Series said Thursday morning.
“There are so many times when I’m here and thinking, ‘Let’s just let her be a normal 13 year old,’ but she’s been so thoughtful, and humble and really intelligent with her answers to questions. She’s handled all this attention and notoriety extremely well. She’s endeared herself to so many people, even with her maturity on the mound. And all that can’t be easy.”
Or the norm.
When the team from Philadelphia were eventually eliminated Thursday night by a team writing a story of its own — inner-city kids from Chicago — it meant that Davis’ Little League ride was finished. It’s up to her parents now to determine whether she’ll accept all kinds of offers to appear on national talk shows or do any late-night “Top Ten” lists.
Meanwhile, Davis’ media trajectory has taken us to points where anthropologists, sociologists and pop culture specialists are joining the conversation with opinions about what kind of impact she has made.
“It didn’t bother me all that much when she first hit the media train and I started hearing about her left and right — I was just excited,” said Jessica Mendoza, the Olympic softball star from Camarillo, former president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and a current contributor to ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” show.
“My initial reaction was: Wow, look how good she is. It was more than just a female player and how cute she was, she was mowing batters down and had a big smile on her face at the end of it.
“I’m impressed with how she’s able to give dominant performances with all the distractions. Many professional athletes can’t even handle that. She’s probably had as much attention as Johnny Manziel. I can’t imagine her waking up and checking her phone or computer and finding out she’s a celebrity.
“My oldest son (Caleb, age 5) has been watching the games, and what I loved about him was that when he saw Mo’ne, he wasn’t saying, ‘It’s a girl, mom,’ it was ‘they can’t hit her pitches.’”
You’ll find enough in the media circle of discontent who grovel that a network like ESPN becomes too intrusive and pushes the wrong narrative in this kind of situation with its cameras, microphones and non-stop promos, adding more pressure to an already stressful situation that is supposed to focus more on teamwork, fun and sportsmanship. We were once there ourselves.
“ESPN is there with more cameras than we see at many major-league games … pandering, quivering, praying for even a single tear drop,” wrote Chicago Sun Times columnist Rick Telander recently. “Thirty or 40 years ago, any rational parent would have said this is too much for kids, too big an invasion of privacy, too close up for unformed pre-adolescents. But that was before reality shows became routine, before glorified slatterns such as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton could make careers out of little more than arrogance and sex tapes, before TV demanded everything from everyone it focused on.”
Yet in a TV era of Honey Boo Boo, the boo boo would be missing the bigger picture here. In today’s all-access world, like it or not, there’s someone like Mo’ne Davis who might teach more adults the better way to react to this kind of attention.
Sure, Davis was the reason some 34,000 showed up to watch her pitch Wednesday night against Las Vegas, and gave ESPN an average of almost five million viewers with a 3.1 household rating. That’s the network’s biggest audience for a Little Game game. ESPN won the night across all TV, cable and broadcast, in many of the male demographics, including 12-to-17 and 25-to-54.
And, perhaps, it’s even creepy to see how her Twitter account jumped from 1,000 three weeks ago past 27,500 on Thursday.
SI’s justification for putting her on the cover is that she has “owned the sports conversation,” according to managing editor Chris Stone. “It’s the easiest type of story to identify as a cover story.”
As writer Albert Chen put it in the SI piece: “She’s a lot of things to a lot of different people, all of them good things: a totem for inner-city baseball, a role model for your 10-year-old niece, a role model for your 10-year-old nephew. Most of all, she’s a laid-back kid just having a really good time.”
Then again, Davis’ media savviness has only been part of the story from this year’s 75th annual event in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Don’t forget the post-game speech that Rhode Island coach David Belisle gave his team, down on one knee, after they were eliminated by Illinois. Maybe he didn’t realize his microphone was still on, but ESPN capturing it made it a YouTube clip to remember.
“Pride … you’re going to take that for the rest of your life what you provided for a town in Cumberland,” Belisle said. “You had the whole place jumpin’. You had the whole state jumpin’. You had New England jumpin’. You had ESPN jumpin’. ‘Cause you wanna know why? They like fighters … They like guys who play the game the right way.”
Then he brought them all in for one big, final hug.
“You’re all my boys,” he said. “You’ll be the boys of summer.”
Which still leaves plenty of room for Mo’ne Davis to remain the media darling of summer.
RECORD, PAUSE, DELETE
Gauging the media’s high- and low-level marks of the week, and what’s ahead:
NOTHING TRIVIAL HERE
Dan Patrick spent a week away from his nationally syndicated morning radio show (heard locally on KLAC-AM 570) by taking his daughter to college — and then taping 15 episodes of the new “Sports Jeopardy!” series at the Sony studios in Culver City. “I thought taking my daughter to school was the challenge,” he said Thursday afternoon during a break of taping five shows over a 10-hour period. “That was easy. This is like landing planes at LAX.” The concept for a first-of-its-kind sports version of the long-running TV game show “Jeopardy!” came to light when the producers at the Sony-owned Crackle.com, famous these days for the on-demand episodes of “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee” with Jerry Seinfeld, signed Patrick up for this project last April. More than 30,000 contestants signed up online and auditions have been taking place since June before the actual taping started this week. “I really do have a new respect for Alex Trebek,” said Patrick of the “Jeopardy!” host who joined his radio show a couple of weeks ago in New York to give him some pointers. “There’s no fear of me ever taking his job. I’m just trying to consume all this information without taking Adderall or Riddlin. They did offer me a B-12 shot before the shows today and that would have helped if I didn’t have a phobia of needles. Maybe I could take it as a suppository?” The “Sports Jeopardy!” series launches Sept. 24, and Patrick’s plans in L.A. this week are to tape 10 more episodes over the weekend before heading back to Connecticut, then do 12 more plus a two-day championship in January before seeing where it goes. One of the people on his staff Howie Schwab, the former ESPN information know-it-all who at one time had his own gameshow “Stump the Schwab” a few years back. “Even Howie will see a question here and go, ‘Now, that’s hard’,” said Patrick. “I consider myself upper-tier in sports trivia, but this will really humble you. So sometimes it’s good to have cold water splashed in your face to remind you of that. I’m getting my own ice bucket challenge here this week.” More information at sportsjeopardy.com.
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More media notes on Tom Hoffarth’s blog: www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth
