What's the cringiest thing you've written?

The Words That Sportswriters Use That Make Me Cringe thread made me think of this. I have two stories both from almost 35 years ago when I was just starting.

I covered a girls basketball game with an Indian high school at one of our local schools that the visitors won handily. In my article, I used every cliché from a cowboys and Indian movie that I could think of. That didn't go over well with my much wiser editor.

The other was from a community college baseball game with a bunch of home runs where I used every slang imaginable -- went deep, touched them all, dinger, round tripper, etc. The same editor asked me what was wrong with just writing home run?

 

I know there are hundreds of formerly young journos who came out of a Poynter seminar hopped up wanting to write the "definitive" 10-inch sidebar on a fire, a charity walk or other such run of the mill stuff you have to grind out on a daily basis. Find the most intensely sad part of a story and describe the color of that person's shoes, the wind coming in from the northwest sweeping their chestnut hair across their urchin-like face etc.

 

I cringe every time I think about all the cover text I wrote for a Christian Slater magazine story back in the day.

Not because of the text, though. Hed and display type were fine. So was the cover photo. Everything looked good.

No, I cringe over that cover because the stupid paginator LEFT THAT COVER STORY OUT OF THE MAGAZINE.

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many shit poems I was certain at the time were worthy of inclusion.

We've all written crap. You get choosier with your tools and wiser in the process. It was always the best thing about the gig.

I agree it is harmful to dress up the mundane. Not everything in life is great and tremendous. Sometimes it's just a well-played game.

 

The first year I was working as a one-man sports department in a small-town paper, it was also my boss's first year. The local girls basketball team had made it deep into the state playoffs, were due to play on the Saturday, and, having a few days, I planned out an entire package of stories, info stuff, etc. My boss was quiet, until he suddenly got the idea that he needed to get involved, and on the Thursday, wanted me to do a whole bunch of stuff for the Friday p.m. paper and the Saturday a.m. paper (we were an afternoon daily 5X a week with a Saturday a.m. session). Spent half my time telling my boss that I was already working on planned stuff because he wasn't around, and the other half of my time trying to keep him happy and still put out three sections in two days.

So sure enough, my stories were a rush job, and our local team's opponent from a few hundred miles away had a name that was very similar to a small town in our coverage area (a couple of letters off). Since I edited my own stuff, naturally, with all that was going on, sure enough, I kept calling the opponent as our local town instead of its actual name. Felt mortified afterward, and when I went to cover the game, local team's AD came over to me and, in a low voice, said "You do know what the name of our opponent's school is, right?"

Next week, my boss was grumbling, and I suggested to him that, in the future, if he wanted to give me a whole bunch of ideas, to do it in the beginning of the week instead of the end of the week when things were already locked in.

 

I had been writing for the campus paper and had gotten chummy with everyone on the beat, including guys from an independent web site/magazine that at the time seemed like a dream job.

I got my courage up and asked to take on a freelance job. They said yes and assigned me a big piece in their football preseason issue, on two star players who’s grown up out of state, a big guy and a skinny guy.

I decided to build it around the summer’s two big movies, Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk. Sent it in and a few days later got it back. The file name included “re-write” and all the movie stuff had been stripped out.

I don’t blame them at all but I was freaking crushed. De. Stroyed.

Ha, to say the least, that was our last collaboration. Things have worked out fine but I still wince when I think about it.

 

I once mentioned a baseball ump strutting like a turkey in heat.

It was a Connie Mack league game, I think.

I was 19, in my first journalism job.

 

At NASCAR.com, we were required to promote stuff from the sanctioning body because of the terms of the contract.

I got the unenviable task one year of having to write a series of articles promoting the Looney Tunes characters in connection with the fall Richmond race -- all suggested by our dimwit content manager without asking any of the writers or editors how painfully embarrassing they might end up.

Easily the worst was trying to write a race preivew using the Mel Blanc voice characterizations of each cartoon. Truly hideous and hopefully it no longer exists on any web server or Wayback Machine page.

As a sports editor, I've had the dubious distinction of having to prove a point by deleting an entire story and telling the writer to try not to mail it in again because I couldn't even make it through the first three grafs without cliche after cliche. The second effort was night and day better.

I've also taken a virtual chain saw to columns and features by some notable people in the business that were just so horrific that the originals never saw the light of day again.

 

Looking back at my clips from 1981-84, before I moved into desk work, just about everything I wrote then makes me cringe now.

 

I learned my lessons.
Once I wrote a team was so highly favored, the only thing that could stop it was a bus crash. Editor saved me from that one.
I also botched "the team is heading into unchartered territory." That made it through, but I got talked to the next day.

 

Everything from the college newspaper... a three-year period when stories were basically long strings of quotes.

But the one professional story that comes to mind is when I wrote about a blended family, and screwed up all the last names. I may even have attributed a baby to the wrong mom. Oddly, no one complained and the coaches and players laughed when I apologized. (Since the grammar, sentence structure, etc. was OK, the various editors involved never knew anything was wrong.)