The Media Go to Camp   

Sportswriter Sam Smith may not be a professional athlete or coach, but he's teaching pro basketball players a thing or two.

Smith, who covers the National Basketball Association for the Chicago Tribune, wants to make sure that athletes and the media have a better relationship, so he attended the NBA's annual rookie orientation to teach the players how to work with reporters.

This year's Rookie Transition Program brought Smith to Lansdowne Resort near Manassas, Virginia, in September, where he spoke to nearly 60 new pro basketball players. The NBA did not pay Smith, the current president of the Pro Basketball Writers' Association, to conduct the seminar, nor would he have accepted payment.

"I wanted to do it," says Smith. "I feel like I have a unique and specific knowledge as to what these kids are going to be dealing with."

The NBA has hosted media representatives during rookie orientation for more than 10 years, according to Teri Washington, spokeswoman for the NBA. The new players may have dealt with the media during college, but the stakes go up--and so do the numbers of reporters covering their games--when they turn pro. "They're young," she says. "We do it to give them a sense of what to expect."

Smith explained some of the encounters that the new recruits might face and, at the request of the NBA, asked some mock interview questions. His chief goal was to convey the importance of a healthy press-player relationship. There has been a widening gulf between players and sportswriters since basketball stars like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan, who were very open with the press, retired (see "Across the Great Divide," December 1996). Today's players are often more suspicious of reporters, says Smith, who stresses that the adversarial relations that have cropped up in basketball in recent years are bad not only for the media, but for readers, too.

"It robs our readers of information they're interested in and would like to have," he says.