Media Sustenance 101

 This just in today from the website Awful Announcing: Kim Mulkey cares about nutrition.

Seems Mulkey's LSU women had just lost to Texas in the SEC women's basketball tournament the other day, and she was up on the podium for the postgame media scrum when she spied something she either didn't approve of or was just joking about. Coin flip deal on that one.

In any case, Mulkey's eagle eye caught a reporter over in the media workroom noshing on mozzarella sticks. Now, perhaps Coach Kim was hungry. Perhaps, like Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny", she wanted aaalll the mozzarella sticks. Inquiring minds will never know.

What they do know is Mulkey pointed in that direction and said, "Are those media over there, or are they just eatin'?"

And here the Blob interrupts our narrative for a brief tutorial. Call it Media Sustenance 101, or Sportswriters Gotta Eat, Too.

First of all: The mozzarella stick nosher was a reporter from Greenville, S.C. named Lulu Kesin. She covers South Carolina women's basketball. Her interest in the LSU-Texas game was therefore zero, which is why she wasn't actually in the postgame presser.

"Then how did Coach Kim see her?" you might be asking.

Well, it's because at big do's like a major conference tournament or the Big Tournament itself, the media is frequently housed in a large open space somewhere in the bowels of the  venue. That means the media work space is frequently located right next to the news conference room. And, given that it's all one big room, they're merely curtained off from one another.

So when Mulkey pointed, she was pointing into the media workroom through a space between the curtains. And so, yes, Kesin and likely other media members were eatin' while they hammered out their gamers or notes or fought comma wars over the phone with their editors.

"You mean they let the media eat at these things?" you're saying now. "What a sweet deal."

Well ... yes it is. Sometimes. Depends where you are and what's on the menu.

(Brief pressbox food tour, from my tour of duty as a scribe: The hot dogs and chili at Notre Dame Stadium were excellent. The hot dogs at Michigan Stadium, on the other hand, were Tubes O' Death. And you never wanted to miss Pork Day at Purdue, because the butterfly pork sandwiches were delish.)

Now, you might wonder if it's entirely ethical (or even safe) to feed a bunch of sportswriters, and that's a legit question. And the answer is it's mostly a matter of practicality and convenience. You go to a basketball tournament or a major college football game, you're there all day and sometimes a good chunk of the night. If you get peckish during that time -- and you will -- there aren't many good options.

Yeah, you could leave the pressbox to go stand in a concession line, but then you miss the Irish scoring on two pass interference penalties, a helmet-to-helmet hit and a sketchy ruling in the end zone. Or you spend the time you're supposed to be writing your halftime blog pursuing the wild North American bratwurst.

Or you can bring in your own food. Some of us do that.

Point is, when Kim Mulkey calls out some sportswriter eatin', she's not making the point (Lookit those pampered elites!) she might think she's making. The dirty secret is, we really don't care that much.

I mean, I never once heard any of my fellow ink-stained wretches indignantly cry, "Hot dogs again? Where the hell's the chateaubriand?"  Heck, for years and years, if you covered the Indianapolis 500, you had to scrounge your own food, and no one really fussed about it. Some of us have pangs of nostalgia for the Speedway's Track Dogs to this day.

Here's the thing, though: I never, ever -- not in 40 years -- saw a scribe inhaling a Track Dog while A.J. Foyt was in the Economaki Press Conference Room telling the assembled media why his car was a tub o' s***.  We do have standards, see.

Yeah, I know. And pigs can fly, right?