KEY POINTS:
Some time back I interviewed a Premiership footballer visiting New Zealand, a well-known international.
I arranged to meet him in his Auckland hotel and turned up at the appointed time.
I knocked on the door. It was opened by an extremely attractive young woman who smiled at me and said: "Oh yes, he's ready for you now," before heading off down the hotel corridor.
The room was almost in darkness. It was 11am. The Famous Footballer was sitting up in bed, covered only by a sheet and apparently naked.
The room stank of... how can I say this gently, all right I can't... sex.
TFF waved expansively at the couch opposite the bed and I took a seat while checking the memory banks to see if I could remember ever interviewing anyone so obviously post-coital.
I asked innocently whether that was his wife. "Oh, that's my... niece," he replied airily. At that moment, my eye fell on an almost indistinguishable object partly hidden under the foot of the bed. It was a pair of women's knickers, rolled up tightly in that fashion when they are taken off with some speed. His 'niece', it appeared, was heading home minus her underwear.
The things sportsmen say to us media types - and it was Jacob Oram's "I'll cut my finger off to play in the World Cup" throwaway line (picked up and amplified by the media) which reminded me of TFF.
Oram's comment was almost refreshing because so many sportsmen and women have trained themselves to say little or nothing controversial or colourful.
Sometimes this is because they have had a brush with the media or have perceived that their comments were beaten up into a lather they did not deserve. For the most part, however, it is a 'safety first' thing and tends to be the rule rather than the exception in this country. Some conversations with our sports stars would put a man on P and intravenous coffee to sleep.
It's a shame because sports fans would benefit from listening to or reading about sports stars who feel free enough to express themselves. But this needs one major element - trust. On both sides.
When I wrote the TFF interview up, I omitted reference to his hotel athletics (but only because I couldn't bring myself to end a marriage - possibly) and because he was voluble enough on other matters to put it in the shade. I mean, "Footballer Has Sex With Woman" is hardly news, is it?
But sportspeople expressing themselves fully need a media who are (a) responsible enough to showcase comments in the spirit with which they were delivered and (b) smart enough to know when they are being joshed.
Regrettably, sometimes neither applies. The reporting of Oram's comments - delivered with a slight smile on his face, apparently - in this country and then the amplified reporting of those reports by overseas media were a hoot.
I read accounts from various Asian news outfits where they wondered about the propriety of a cricketer doing such a thing (as if Oram had already done it or had even intended to). Newsrooms here received calls from newspeople from overseas, asking if he'd "cut it off yet"?
I watched recently on US TV as a female reporter (who obviously knew nothing about the football game she was covering) was sent into the crowd to do "fan bites" and was hilariously covinced by three chubby Canadians that they were part of the Canadian Olympic Hide And Seek team.
It also brought to mind the escapades of one Joey Skaggs, an infamous media hoaxer in the USA who has embarrassed many reputable media folk by setting up improbable news stories, fanning the flames and then denouncing the whole thing as a hoax. He tries to show how the media can routinely feed the public with misinformation and laziness and inaction when it comes to double-checking facts.
Two of Skaggs' famous hoaxes were the Cathouse for Dogs ("get your dog a little tail", was the supposed slogan of a place where dog owners took their dogs for, ahem, some R&R. . .) and the Celebrity Sperm Bank where he hoaxed media that famous semen had been robbed and held hostage.
But perhaps the best was the Luther Blissett Project - a group of people in Europe who all called themselves by the name of the black English footballer plucked from Watford to play for Italian giants AC Milan because, as the story goes, he was mistaken for the rather more talented John Barnes.
Blissett was a disaster at Milan but his name lived on as the group began a series of intricate media hoaxes also designed to show how some media can be easily hoodwinked into providing false information - a lesson there for all journalists.
The most complex came in 1997 when LBP set up a hoax involving black masses, satanism, Christian witch-hunts - all swallowed by the Italian media and crusading politicians and turned into a national scandal before LBP fessed up.
Couldn't happen in New Zealand, could it? Better ask Jacob Oram.
