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The Rise of the Professional-Athlete Podcast

Postgame analysis is an integral part of the sports experience. After the final buzzer, fans take to the internet, television and radio to learn what their teams did to win (made their shots, played defense) or lose (missed their shots, didn’t play defense). Even the sports-averse can easily picture what this traditionally looks like: four men (maybe three men and one woman), seated behind a long desk, offering sage insights like “I thought they struggled with catching the ball,” to solemn nods of agreement. And yet, for the entirety of the recently concluded N.B.A. Finals, won by the Golden State Warriors over the Boston Celtics, this kind of analysis was also delivered by a more intimate source: the Warriors’ own Draymond Green, who, following every contest, left the court to analyze the game he’d just played, as the host of a podcast called “The Draymond Green Show.”

Podcasts run by current and former athletes have boomed in recent years, but Green’s is made singular by his insatiable appetite for talking. Most of his active N.B.A. peers will release new podcast installments every few weeks; Green, over the two-month duration of the playoffs, released 23, somehow carving out more time to chat as the Warriors closed in on the title. This habit came in for some scrutiny after Game 3 of the Finals, which the Warriors lost, and in which Green played especially poorly, scoring 2 points and registering only 3 assists. Afterward, he retreated to his hotel and sat in front of a laptop, his back against the curtains — today’s popular podcasts tend to also be released as video streams — to share his thoughts, sounding both humbled (“Tonight may have been one of the worst nights of my career”) and defiant about the insinuation that his attentions were divided (“This podcast ain’t going nowhere”). One representative reaction came from the ESPN anchor Stephen A. Smith: “All of that talking — 2 points.”

Some of the backlash felt territorial. Pundits like Smith make their living off the idea that they can analyze what’s going on with players like Green, but such opinions seem irrelevant when Green himself offers direct access to his thought process. Some also felt like moralizing. It’s not as though Green’s teammates locked themselves in the gym after that loss; they presumably ate with their families, texted friends, maybe unwound in front of the television. Green’s podcast is more public, but he talked for less than half an hour, hardly an all-night distraction.

My own resistance to the podcast came on other grounds: It wasn’t very interesting. Green is a brilliant tactician whose ability to describe his own play is often astute, but here his performance seemed a bit exhausted; after all, he’d just played 35 minutes of competitive basketball, and lost. He took long pauses. He offered rote observations about his teammates (“Steph and Klay both shot well”) and how he could improve his own play (“For me, the biggest adjustment is just coming out and being Draymond Green”). He did not sound like a high-level player sketching out the strategic and emotional nuances of his profession. He sounded like a guy who, much as the critics said, could actually benefit from just getting some sleep.

Even podcasting’s most ardent evangelizers would have to acknowledge that many podcasts are oriented around a very basic premise: “Here are some people talking.” The format’s simplicity makes it easy for almost any known figure to get involved. The actresses Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, for example, host “Office Ladies,” in which they rewatch and comment on “The Office,” the NBC comedy in which they starred. One of the most successful podcasts ever, “WTF With Marc Maron,” has the host inviting other comedians to discuss their work and their histories in interviews whose sincerity and breadth can resemble therapy sessions. In each show, and others like them, part of the appeal is simply to hear from familiar voices, but the real attraction is how they demystify what these people do, allowing talented figures to break down their talent-utilization processes. This is the premise of so many athlete-run podcasts: Draymond’s, or “The Old Man and the Three” (in which the former N.B.A. players JJ Redick and Tommy Alter trade stories and discuss the modern league), or “All the Smoke” (the former N.B.A. journeymen Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson trade stories and discuss the modern league), or “I Am Athlete” (the former N.F.L. receivers Brandon Marshall and Chad Johnson trade stories and discuss the modern league).

But the demystification process can, at times, be too thorough. I, and many others, watch sports in large part to be awed: Sometimes it seems truly unbelievable that someone like Steph Curry can do what he does, and the experience of witnessing it in real time, the act of creation right in front of you, provides inexplicable joy. Surprisingly, though, it turns out to be deeply enervating to hear these athletes talk about it. Sports, for them, is mostly a fun job they have, or used to have; they tend to have thoughts about every aspect of it besides the magic of the game itself.

I wonder what it’s like for Green to know, a split second before throwing a pass, where Curry will materialize, or what it’s like to mentally calculate how quickly to backpedal to the rim to reject an incoming dunk. But on these podcasts, we mostly get the usual punditry: “Steph and Klay shot well,” “Boston’s a very physical team.” Occasionally the hosts reveal their emotions, but never for long. Over time, they often ease into a strange blend of opacity and transparency: The tone suggests we’re hearing something uniquely honest, but the content is indistinguishable from what an educated outsider might guess. Much of the players’ perspective, you begin to realize, is rooted in being themselves. They know their co-workers and what happens in locker rooms and what the game looks like up close; we don’t. The more they offer their perspective, the clearer they make it that we can never totally understand their experience. Listening to them begins to feel like eavesdropping on a stockbroker walking his client through a series of trades — both mundane and exclusive.

There is, to be fair, something bluntly true about a statement like “The biggest adjustment is just coming out and being Draymond Green.” Green can speak this way because millions of fans know exactly what “being Draymond Green” represents on the court. What podcasting offers, as he enters the back half of his career, is a space where he can continue to “be Draymond Green,” even after retiring from the court, untrammeled by the strictures on television’s talking heads. Listening to him across the length of the playoffs, I didn’t understand anything more about how he experiences his career, or what it’s like to be a hyperathletic human surrounded by others, all moving and reacting at the speed of thought. But I came, I think, to understand a bit about how he sees himself. I imagine it’s a reality-reshaping experience to have your athletic skill earn you an outsize presence in our culture. Many players struggle when the spotlight is yanked away. Now Green, and others, have a whole new means of remaining their iconic, spotlit selves for as long as possible. If that sounds like an act of ego, I can’t pretend it’s a unique one in contemporary society. At least this way I’m less in awe of him, a more appropriate way to feel about a guy who, like anyone else with a podcast — like anyone else in the world, really — is just talking.


Source photographs: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images.

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