Nov 01 2009
Athletes and You Know
Recently I tuned into the pre-game baseball playoff show for the NY Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies World Series and I wasn’t surprised to hear the overuse of “YOU KNOW!” It’s only in the last few years that I have noticed how many times it’s been over-used in interviews with famous athletes.
Why is it when a famous athlete is asked a question while being interviewed, they always reply somewhere in their answer with “You Know.” It doesn’t matter which sport the athlete is from, be it baseball, hockey, basketball and there’s probably others… they all say it. Is this a North American thing? I’ll let you know when I start to more pay attention to UK soccer players being interviewed.
Also, if the viewers knew what an athlete was going to say then there would be no need for the interview. Right? Maybe the athletes are tired of always having to reply to the same old questions from the reporters. Perhaps, we the viewing audience do know the replies from the athletes.
Actually, I find the use of this phrase in answers extremely annoying. I would like to see all athletes interviews not use this phrase in their replies or at least limit it’s use to once. Like I said: “You know, if I knew, then sports reporters wouldn’t be interviewing you in the first place!”
This term is like a disease amongst athletes and it seems to be very contagious! More and more athletes are saying it. Its spread cannot be contained amongst athletes and it will spread rapidly from sport to sport. How can we contain this verbal disease? It seems this disease is totally unstoppable.
I mentioned the overuse of YOU KNOW on Twitter recently too, but let’s face it, with 140 characters you just can’t say much in a coherent manner on the Twitter website. Who would have thought that 140 characters would have made this site so famous and so talked about in the media and used by news channels. Imagine if every comedian was forced to tell his or her joke in 140 characters!!!
Let’s get back to those interviews between the reporters and a couple of star pitchers in this World Series. I was listening to CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee being interviewed. Both pitchers are extremely amazing. Each one of them also uses “You Know” many times in their replies. CC Sabathia went absolutely overboard in his replies using this phrase so many, many times, that I lost count in keeping track!
I think it would really be interesting to keep a tally of how many “You Knows” each athlete uses and come up with a per word count usage ratio! Who do you link would win? I think I should have kept a list of all the abusers of the phrase “You Know” in their conversations with reporters. Perhaps I will write a follow-up article in the near future with a list of famous athletes who use this phrase the most.
In my opinion, this article is a more humorous look at sport. Perhaps I am making a lot about nothing, but then Seinfeld was supposedly a comedy show about nothing and look… it turned about to be one of the absolute best and most successful comedy TV shows ever. We haven’t seen a show as good since it went off air.
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