LAST week it seemed Sonny Bill Williams’ media advisors had come back from a long holiday.
We had Sonny Bill boxing, Sonny Bill’s response to a shin stress fracture, Sonny Bill might have suffered an embolism (he didn’t), Sonny Bill’s goals, Sonny Bill wanting to be the real deal, Sonny Bill and his struggles with tinea…OK, so I made the last one up, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there wasn’t a story on that somewhere.
A lot of it falls into the category of women’s magazine fluff.
“You have to take risks in life. You could injure yourself playing touch or falling off a treadmill.” Yes, or you could cop a punch in the swede and break your jaw and be out of your paying job for a while.
More interesting, however, was the revelation by columnist Marc Hinton that Sonny Bill “…hand-picks his interviewers and makes his significant media statements through them.”
As Hinton asks, “(w)ho else gets to select the people they want to talk to, when they want to talk to them and decide what they’ll talk to them about?”
I’ve banged on about the SIS level security clearances required by journalists who want to talk to rugby players, but this takes it to a different level.
I, for one, am not really interested in what Sonny Bill thinks or has had for breakfast. I am interested in what he achieves or does not achieve on the sporting stage.
We have seen a move from sports reporting to sports celebrity gossip columns.
Last week another newspaper reported that Lance Armstrong was in Queenstown.  How did they know this?  Because his private jet was parked at Queenstown airport.  It would have been hilarious to discover that his brother, or manager had borrowed it for a week-long bender, but it still would not have really been news.
Dan Carter turns up somewhere to promote undies.  Not news.  It’s a footy player in his jocks.  The St Kilda Saints AFL team bowls a few overs in the nets to the Black Caps.  Not news, although the snippet that Scott Styris was bowled by one of them should have made coach John Wright’s radar vibrate furiously.
There’s a limited amount of space of the sports pages of tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper.  As the rugby season begins in earnest in a couple of weeks, we will be deluged with tat.
There will be endless stories that include sentences like “Bingo McJingo still pinches himself when he trains with Tana Umaga.  ‘He was like my hero and now I’m playing with him…’” and at least four different stories about how Ali Williams’ Achilles tendon hasn’t snapped again, or has snapped again, as the case may be.
There will be the usual “we’re a much better team than our results suggest” and the “it’s crunch time for the Highlanders/Chiefs/Hurricanes/Blues” interviewing-your-typewriter masquerading as a real story.
Meanwhile, the great news for every other sport is that this will nauseatingly continue until the last week of October, when the World Cup final is due to be played.
There is no break in the rugby season from February 15 until then. I’m thinking about getting some journalism students to do a study on column centimetres devoted to tat on rugby.
However, like most of the stories produced, it will be a waste of their time.  Managed to the nth degree, prepare yourself for sports pages full of what ‘they’, like Sonny Bill’s management, want you to hear, read, or see for all of 2011.