I STILL Hate Christian Laettner
- treyhendricks
- Feb 22, 2016
- 2 min read
**Before we get into the thick of things, hate is a strong word and I do not truly hate Christian Laettner, but for the purposes of the title of this episode, I had to include it.**
I recently watched a segment of one of my favorite documentary series', ESPN 30 For 30. ESPN has famous directors put together compelling documentaries based on various popular or unheard of stories throughout sports history. The most recent episode I watched was titled "I Hate Christian Laettner." The 90 minute episode aired in 2015 and captured the basketball career of Christian Laettner, a Duke superstar who rubbed the majority of the nation's basketball viewers teh wrong way. This documentary chronicled Laettner's upbringing, which differed from how most college basketball fans thought of his past. As opposed to being a privileged white pretty boy, he was actually a very hard working kid from a blue collar family. The documentary also showed some of his "cockiness" throughout his career. Laettner said in the documentary that it was just him embracing the spotlight.
Being the expert in persuasion that I am, I instictually have to tie it into the episode that I just watched. I analyzed as to whether this 90 minute clip expressed the central processing theory or the peripheral processing theory. The central processing theory involves cognitive elaboration. This entails thinking about the content of a message, reflecting on the ideas and information contained in it, and scrutinizing the evidence and reasoning presented. The peripheral processing theory entails focusing on cues that aren't directly related to the subtsance of a message. An example of this includes focuinging on a source's physical attractiveness or the sheer quantity of arguments presented, etc. Essentially, one uses motivation to process a message and ability to process a message while the other uses heuristic cues for simplifying the thought process.
As I watched this documentary and reflected on the pieces of information that was being presented to me, I compared it to my final opinion of Mr. Laettner and tried to figure out which process was occuring in my mind. I settled on the peripheral process. My reasoning for this is that after the completion of this documentary, I STILL "hated" Christian Laettner. While ESPN gave counterpoints to ALL of my arguments for disliking him, just seeing his antics over and over, while also judging him based on my previous thoughts of him, led me to have the same opinion. My mind was not using the reasoning that ESPN was presenting me with. Instead, I was focusing on the source's other elements.
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