SEPTEMBER 2019 | CHICAGO 125
(Continued from page 77)
Mitch Trubisky
Trubisky is extremely cautious in
choosing his words in interviews, too.
When I ask if he minds that I use a
recorder, he shrugs it off: “I talk as if
everything’s recorded anyways.”
He learned that the hard way in col-
lege. “I wasn’t good when I first came
in,” he says of his media skills. “I would
actually say how I feel.” That included
voicing his frustrations. Before his first
start in 2016, after a year as a redshirt
and two as a backup, he told the Daily
Tar Heel that he had spent his time on
the bench pondering an exit plan: “I was
always thinking, ‘Well, if I’m not gonna
get my opportunity here, maybe I need
to go somewhere else.’ ”
He’s more circumspect now, but he
knows that can lead to canned answers,
and so he studies tape of his own press
conferences and interviews like they’re
an opponent’s defensive schemes. He
identifies the words and phrases he
tends to overuse, like “for sure,” and
he will occasionally catch himself
mid-exchange should he let one slip. “I
don’t want to make it seem like I’m just
regurgitating it back,” he says. “I want
to make it sound more like a conversa-
tion.” I note that this must require some
mental gymnastics, and he replies in the
affirmative: “For sure.”
He’s getting more comfortable with
his media appearances. In May, he went
on ESPN Radio’s The Dan Le Batard Show
With Stugotz, where he breezed through
a lightning round of increasingly absurd
food questions. When producer Billy
“Guillermo” Gil asked him which con-
diments he would choose if his fingers
were replaced with sauce dispensers, he
answered with little hesitation: “Ketchup,
honey mustard, Buffalo, ranch, and rasp-
berry vinaigrette.”
“Very definitive answers he’s giving
us,” Le Batard said. I ask Trubisky about
the interview, and he concurs. “I was
decisive, right?”
Le Batard also asked him if he goes
by Mitch or Mitchell, which is a question
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