Is it not OK to stumble away sometimes when emotion and loss hit you hard?
I say respect someone's space in moments like that.
This comment is worthy of an entire chain of posts in the Journalism forum.
From the time we penned our first news brief, we were taught "ask the tough questions." It leads to the Why, or sometimes the How. I always found myself feeling a bit queasy about putting someone on the spot when their emotions are the rawest. But that's we were trained to do. You try your best to put your own emotions on auto-pilot and function as a reporter.
NASA squirreled away Christa McAuliffe's parents -- and the other relatives of the Challenger astronauts -- before we could get a comment, and to be honest, I really didn't know what they could have said to add to the story that day.
I can tell you it never gets easier talking to someone who just lost a championship. But we're talking about a game -- yes, someone's livelihood -- but we all woke up this morning. Try knocking on the door of someone's home whose spouse was found dead, or trying to interview people who lost everything in a natural disaster. Or in
@MileHigh's case, when suddenly you're the one answering instead of asking.
I agree with
@Chef2 that Rory should have given some response before he left the course, even if it was just "I need time to think about what I want to say."
Yes, it makes for powerful prose (or a video clip) if the subject can clearly express his or her emotions with a minimum amount of time to process what just happened. But that's rare, and usually there's an uneasy silence while the words are trying to form.
Rory's reaction and expression in the scoring room was all anyone really needed to be able to write a damn good column Sunday night. Anything he might have said might have diminshed that emotional gut punch we all witnessed. And to put the shoe on the other foot, if it had happened to us, what words would make a difference?
