When I say that my sports reporting was unique, it is not a brag.
Although I do think I was a good sports reporter, my belief that I was unique is not about quality. It is about how I colored outside the lines – how I was allowed to color outside the lines. I can’t think of no other reporting given so much rope, so part of the blame surely falls on editors who didn’t follow the sports pages close enough!
At first, I covered sports normally: an opening paragraph summarizing the result, followed by a breakdown of how the game played out, who scored, who made a crucial play, and a quote or two. But then (I can’t recall the exact game or sport), I decided to add more color to it by embellishing, at first, then completely making shit up.
I should give credit to my good friend, the late Rod McNish, who was the Daily News sports reporter while I was still pondering college and allowed me to submit a weekly floor hockey league write-up called Rudy’s Report. This was a precursor to my sports editor antics as I embellished and editorialized considerably – although the men’s floor hockey league was an absolute gong show most times and didn’t need much enhancement.
I did get actual quotes from players at first but, then, at some point, I decided the quotes needed more flavor because, well, you know how rote they can be most times:
“It was a full team effort tonight.”
“We battled hard.”
“This is what we play for.”
A lot of them don’t even make sense:
“Everyone gave 110 percent.”
“We all showed up today.”
“It wasn’t just me.”
“It could have gone either way.”
That’s not to say that there weren’t some thoughtful, original quotes but they were few and far between. But even the thoughtful ones weren’t really, well, that funny. Yeah, I wanted some funny too.
The first one I can recall was from a player whose softball team had just lost in the championship game. His bogus quote was along the lines of “We came up short but at least I know that I played a great game.”
After the story came out, there was a bit of a buzz about the quote because, well, people believed it, including some of his teammates, who took offense. Days later, he approached me, genuinely bewildered, and asked why I had printed the false quote. My answer was a phrase that I would use many, many times in my life, regarding my writing, my theatre performances, or off-the-cuff comments in a social setting: “I thought it was funny.”
My favorite comedian, George Carlin, once said that his job as a comedian is to find the line and deliberately cross it. I did that often in my sports reporting, in my columns, and onstage. I regret some of it (there were a few huge blunders that I had to profusely apologize for) but most of them were recognized as jokes as I can only recall a few people who got very angry with me. Some people saw it as a badge of recognition, waiting to become part of the club.
Some guys didn’t even know they were victims of a gag. This one player, I’ll call him Larry Swenson, was a terrific athlete and, thus, a member of numerous championship teams in different sports. Like most reporters, I would take several photos of championship teams and pick the best one for publication. Whenever Larry was on the team, I would take a few more photos to enhance the chance of having one in which his eyes were closed – and that was the one I would print.
It wasn’t until the third or fourth time that Larry noticed his eyes were always closed in the photos and, being somewhat naïve, he attributed it to plain ol’ bad luck. But I couldn’t hold back my smirk, giving away that I was doing it on purpose, prompting his trademark response of being slightly amused but also irked, followed by an ineffective retort.
I also got one in on my buddy, Rod McNish. I will not repeat it as it definitely straddled the line, but it was a different gag in which I took a tragic wire story on a famous athlete and inserted a bogus quote from Rod among quotes from other famous athletes and coaches. Rod, while in disbelief, got a good laugh out of it. His mother did not.
A week or so after the gag quote was printed, I ran into Rod’s mother, Grace, at a theatre event and she expressed her displeasure at the article. I’ll always remember her husband, John, barely concealing a grin as he occasionally glanced at me.
Like so many things I have done over the years, I have some regrets about my rogue style of sports writing. Today, I still make slips in my writing and in group conversations, when I think something is funny and put it out there without really thinking about it. But, while my regrets are real, I have also learned to accept myself as someone who is always going to make such mistakes. I will continue to experiment and occasionally fail horribly; to do otherwise might make me lose some of the good things that I produce.
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