Marshawn Lynch did not invent the art of the da-da press availability, but over the last two days of strategic terseness he succeeded in elevating it to a sort of art. Pinned wriggling under the lights at the nonsense carnival of Super Bowl media days, Lynch turned his discomfort into a sullen art. The result was the most damning possible critique of this event’s signature inanity storm; media people asked Lynch questions he did not want to answer, and he did not answer them.
When it became clear that he was going to not-answer each question with the same phrase, the questions themselves shifted towards tough-guy provocation, with one swinging-dick knight of the Order Of The One-Sentence Paragraph after another taking turns baiting the unresponsive star. There was something dickish on both sides of the transaction, unavoidably; both teams, as they say, played hard. But the final effect was a stunning reduction—all the way down to its grumpy essence—of the unsatisfied and unsatisfying relationship between the sports media and its subjects. Whatever else Lynch succeeds in doing as a football player, he notched a great highlight as a satirist. As it turns out, he was just getting warmed up.
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On Thursday, in five minutes of furious Oakland-ness, Lynch finally spoke to the media. Or at the media, more like, as he explicitly made the point he’d spent the last two days making implicitly. If Lynch had to drop his minimalist routine, this was absolutely the way to do it.
None of this will not do anything to alter the dynamic or the ritual, most likely. But as a capper to one of the great weeks of performance art in NFL history, it’s pretty effective. The usual designated grumps will grump about it, because that is what they do:
But the point has been made. Shout-out to Oakland, California.
