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Imrem: The game within the postgame

Game action has become the undercard for postgame inaction as newsmakers make news by not making news.

First Cam Newton behaves badly and bolts after the Carolina Panthers lose the Super Bowl. Then Joel Quenneville answers one question and bolts after the Chicago Blackhawks are shut out.

Those two media sessions combined were good for about five minutes combined.

What's next, Joe Maddon issuing a "no comment"? Attorneys no longer giving closing arguments? Larry David not speaking for Bernie Sanders?

Sounds of silence would be OK in a Bizarro World where John Fox walks up to reporters and asks, "Do you fellas need anything?"

Not going to happen. Nor is Bill Belichick suddenly going to open up an industrial-sized can of conversation. Nor is Derrick Rose going to start making sense.

If Newton would have taken on all comers and all questions on Super Sunday, he would have filled notepads with glorified gibberish like when he finally did speak volumes of nothing Tuesday.

At least Newton stopped short of saying, "Oh, yeah, well I make more money than you do" and "Which Super Bowl did you play in?"

If Quenneville would have kept going Tuesday night, it wouldn't have mattered since only 7.4 percent of Americans understand hockey-speak.

Still, journalists insist the First Amendment says sports figures must crank up the cliché machine after games to explain why they won, why they lost or why ties have been phased out of sports.

To their credit, most sports writers do hold themselves accountable for their gaffes.

Last year a reader called me out for brain-cramping that Dale Earnhardt Jr., not Dale Sr., died in a 2001 crash at Daytona.

I took full responsibility by conceding to the reader that Junior might still be alive.

Another reader bashed me for referring to Packers head coach Mike McCarthy as Mike McCormick, or was it the other way around?

Either way, I took full responsibility by suggesting that maybe a copy reader switched the names on me or that maybe the sentence was taken out of context.

Another reader wrote last week that he knew for sure I was a year off on Walter Payton's age because he was born on the same day as Sweetness.

I'm withholding judgment on that one until seeing both of their birth certificates.

The point is that mistakes should be acknowledged. I try to answer all reader mail. First, it's the right thing to do; second, I have no life.

Football and hockey fans probably couldn't care less that Newton and Quenneville left the media whining for more, more, more.

Most Super Bowl partyers were so liquored up at game's end that they wouldn't have understood Newton's explanations anyway.

Most Blackhawks fans already had blurted the expletives over a no-goal call that Quenneville would have blurted had he stuck around.

Unlike media members, sports figures don't like to hear themselves talk. They prefer tweeting inane tweets on Twitter and having to delete them before too much damage is done.

Some are writing their own stories on the The Players Tribune so they can sort of be like Charles Barkley, who once claimed to be misquoted in his autobiography.

(By the way, I'm still apologizing for once typing Charles "Oakley" instead of Charles "Barkley," or was it the other way around?)

Yes, the game after the game is the better game when all is said and done.

Or not said.

mimrem@dailyherald.com

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