Grant Cohn is a reporter covering the San Francisco 49ers on the SI website. His abrasive, unorthodox approach has made him into the players’ (and many fans’) bête noire, but I was startled to see this recent tweet from fullback Kyle Juszczyk: “Maybe we can keep @grantcohn from always hanging around our lockers while we’re changing.” Reporters generally hang out in the middle of the locker room while the players change.
The “Harvard-educated” (according to his Twitter profile, even though he graduated 12 years ago) running back is aware those words are the equivalent of “shanking” a fellow prisoner in a jailhouse, but they haven't been deleted yet. Such accusations linger on indefinitely.
Cohn’s no-holds-barred assessments of both Niners players and management has a large contingent of fans in a near-constant state of apoplexy, yet they keep going back to him for more. Most serious sports fans who support one team exclusively don't want to hear blunt talk about their team’s weaknesses, even when the team's messing up. They're the equivalent of conservatives who only watch Fox News and liberals who stick to MSNBC. Juszczyk’s just handed this disgruntled group a gift—a club to batter Cohn with. Who are they going to believe—their beloved fullback or the meanie who puts down their team?
The vitriol directed at Cohn is beyond anything I've ever seen a reporter subjected to. Many of the less discerning 49ers fans are taking what Juszczyk stated at face value and assuming that a verified reporter who's been allowed in the locker room for years is a gay peeping Tom. Here's a sampler of some of the Twitter replies to Juszczyk’s tweet: “buddy in there cock watching”; “wood watching”; “he’s just Peter gazing”; “the old meat gazer Grant.” For every supporter, there's about 30 detractors.
Part of the background to this drama is the movement by the NFL Players Association to move all interviews out of the locker room because of privacy concerns. In the past, when reporters entered the locker room with just pen and pad, this wasn’t much of a concern, but with the filming that now goes on, there have been instances when nude players appearing in the background have been aired. There are less extreme ways of protecting player privacy than banning all locker room interviews, a practice that Major League Baseball and NBA players are not clamoring for. Kyle Juszczyk’s accusation was made as a “quote tweet” response to an NFL Players Association tweet calling for banning interviews in the locker room. There are legitimate ways for players to support this rule change, and then there's Kyle Juszczyk’s way.
There's additional context to Juszczyk’s tweet as well. Cohn’s style of reporting sometimes mocks the players he covers. Before Juszczyk got his shot in, the reporter had released a video on Twitter in which he was imitating the fullback moving around a lot before the ball gets hiked, but never getting the ball. “Wearing out the grass” was how Cohn put it, and that's exactly what he does.
In last Sunday’s embarrassing loss to the Arizona, in which the Niners blew a 13-point lead in the second half, Juszczyk had no passes thrown to him and no handoffs to him for a total of zero yards. That's why Cohn’s called for benching the fullback and replacing him with a player who gets the ball—an extra wide receiver. Juszczyk took offense, and chose to respond with a low blow that could be construed as homophobic, although Cohn is a straight, married man. The player's suggesting his nemesis is gay. This puts Juszczyk on shaky ground, especially since he plays for a team representing a city long known for its tolerance towards gay people. While there's no other evidence, besides what a disgruntled player says, that Cohn has ever acted inappropriately in the locker room, he must now deal with the fact that a bunch of 49ers fans now think he’s a pervert.
One might expect that the media would come to the defense of one of their own, especially since Juszczyk is part of an effort to deny the press a right they've had for years. But SFGate, the digital home of the San Francisco Chronicle, ran this headline: “Yet another 49ers player calls out reviled beat reporter.” Reviled? Are they talking about a terrorist? Making such an explosive claim and then following that up with stating that Juszczyk “called out” Grant Cohn implies that accusation was legitimate when it was meant to slime the reporter. This is irresponsible journalism.
Writer Alex Simon, offering no lifelines to his fellow sportswriter, wrote, “He’s also been known to self-aggrandize,” a reference to Cohn’s schtick of pretending to be the head of 49ers quality control in his videos. It's an amusing technique that he uses to offer fixes to various team problems—and they're often worth considering—but it doesn't fit with SFGate’s staid style of reporting that requires reverence towards the team they make themselves subservient to. The result is dull, plain-vanilla sportswriting.
I look for 49ers news and opinions, but never on SFGate. I’d say that Alex Simon should rethink the way he reports on such stories if he wants to be the sensitive guy who lists his pronouns—he/him—on Twitter as he does. What Juszczyk did to Cohn is similar to disrespecting someone by deliberately refusing to use their preferred pronouns.
Many of Cohn’s detractors would say he's getting what he had coming, but he doesn't cast personal aspersions on his targets like Juszczyk did, so that doesn't ring true. He does sometimes go overboard, but that's balanced out by the fact that he's not afraid to say things that should be said about the 49ers. The rest of the puppy-dog media’s too loyal to the team they cover to dispense the truth, but Cohn is loyal to fans who want straight talk. Those fans who don't labor under the misapprehension that the team will somehow improve without being criticized.