As Greg Hardy looks to continue his NFL career, he sat down for an interview with ESPN’s Adam Schefter to talk about the domestic violence incident that has followed any mention of his name for the last couple years. He denied he laid a hand on his former girlfriend, while repeatedly offering statements that were outlandish or just plain false.
A lot of backlash has come toward Schefter, including from ESPN colleague Michelle Beadle wondering why the network gave Hardy a platform. During an appearance on WEEI radio in Boston, Schefter dismissed the notion of the interview as a public relations stunt.
“Well, again, I didn’t think about it like that. I thought about the fact that we’ve got a real serious issue in our society. This guy’s never addressed any of these issues that have come up. He’s never done it one-on-one and, yeah, I’m sure he came in with an agenda and so did I. That was the way I felt like I was going about this. This was a guy that made a lot of headlines, had been in a lot of controversies, had never sat down and explained his viewpoint one on one. He could have whatever agenda he wants — doesn’t matter to me. I’m going in there to get somebody who in my mind has been a controversial figure about a very serious subject to talk about it in a way that he’s never ever addressed it before.”
If Hardy wanted to make himself look employable to NFL teams, the interview clearly did not accomplish that. He left himself open to follow-up questions that a better interviewer would have asked, but Schefter largely did not touch for some reason. That suggests that Schefter, and ESPN by connection, was hand-picked to do the interview by Hardy and agent Drew Rosenhaus under the idea a heavy public interrogation would not come.
During an appearance on the ‘Dan Patrick Show’ Tuesday, Schefter offered that it “doesn’t matter what I believe” in terms of whether or not Hardy assaulted his ex-girlfriend. Actually it does, or at least should, matter what a good interviewer believes about the authenticity of the person he or she is interviewing. Schefter makes his living as an information guy, and he’s typically very good at that job. But he was in over his head interviewing Hardy and there’s no getting around that.
