Another discussion on how to quote athletes

You mean you can actually understand what Warrior was saying? Props.

Where I am, it seems a lot of kids can't clearly complete a thought. As a result, some quotes are slightly adjusted to make sense. If the quote's a lost cause, I simply don't use it.

 

"In my final meeting with the gods from the heavens above, as they spoke to me and hit me with the power of the Ultimate Warrior, they told me 'Exit stage left! Exit stage right! There is no place to run; all the fuses in the exit signs have been burned out!'"

For a good laugh: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Warrior_(wrestler)

 

I generally clean out all of the ums, the ahs, the you knows, etc., especially with a lot of the guys I cover who throw those in every fifth word. I think that's just common sense.

But I've had editors who have changed quotes when my sources said things like "gotta" or "gonna," for instance. I personally don't agree with that. That's the way 18-year-old kids talk; heck it's how I talk. Who cares?

 

Eh, I've got no problem with that. It *sounds* like gonna. But if you asked a person to write out their quote for you, they would write "going to."

Where do draw the line? If you're quoting a kid from Boston: "I gawtta go pahk my cah," Sully said.

After all, he said "gawtta" instead of "got to" and "pahk" instead of "park" and "cah" instead of "car." That's how he talks, right?

 

Acknowledging the difference between pronunciation differences and two entirely different sets of words (going to/gonna) would be a good start.

 

Big difference here. Gotta and gonna aren't "got to" and "going to" that sound different because of an accent. They mean the same thing, but they're separate entities. Just like "We ain't gonna let this loss get to our heads" means the same thing as "We aren't going to let this loss get to our heads." But "ain't" and "aren't" are not the same word the way "pahk" and "park" are. In your example, Sully is saying, "I gotta go park my car."

I always leave gotta and gonna in quotes if that's how someone says them. And I don't see why it's an issue because probably 95 percent of the people I've ever interviewed say gotta and gonna. And, if you asked me to write what I said for you, I would write gotta. I was quoted in a story way back in the day, read a cleaned-up quote the next day (reporter had no tape recorder) and thought, "Hell, I sound nothing like that when I talk."

P.S. Spell check on this board has no issue with gonna and gotta. It did have an issue with gawtta, pahk and cah.

 

If we didn't clean up quotes to some extent, much of what appears in print would be completely unreadable. We've all transcribed interviews and after going 300 words without using a period — because, after all, you're typing it just as the person has rambled on and on and on — you realize it needs a little handiwork, that it would be a disaster to run it as is.

 

I once interviewed Bart Starr on a variety of topics (long after he retired), and he made it a point of grabbing my arm after the interview and requesting that I "clean up" his quotes. He mentioned something like people don't always speak with perfect English, so don't leave their mistakes in quotes. He said it makes athletes and coaches look very bad and that when writers talk out loud, they make the same mistakes as coaches and athletes. And he was very serious about this.

My guess is that this stems from when he coached the Packers in the 70s and had a very acrimonious divorce when he just wasn't that successful. There were several Wisconsin sportswriters that he devloped major rifts with, and I'm guessing he was steamed at the way he was quoted. Probably was convinced they intentionally made him look stupid or took things out of context. My guess is that he tells people who interview him the same thing he told me, because he felt he's been burned before. It really took me by surprise, though Bart's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, so it's not like he was a dick about it or anything. Just very stern.

Anyways, I wasn't going to change my quotes because just Bart Starr wanted me to, but when I sat down to write the story, just about every quote I used verbatim from my tape recorder came out very clean on paper, so nothing looked weird or needed to be altered after all.

 

An even better place to start would be with the realization that "gonna" isn't technically a word.

 

Well, if spell check on a message board says it, it's gotta be true.

On another points: Please note that I didn't say you should never, ever, ever use gotta or gonna in quotes. I was responding to someone who said they're desk usually changes those words, and I said I had no problem with it, because they weren't, you know, words.

In some cases, it makes sense to pepper your quotes with "gonnas" ... but I don't think it's smart writing to say we always, always, always have to go with gonna. I think that's just silly, for reasons I've outlined above.

 

OK, then I'll say it. You should never, ever use gotta or gonna. That's not what the person said because there are no such words. He (or she) said got to and going to and slurred his (or her) words together. Whoever said gotta and gonna are different from matters of pronunciation is wrong. That's exactly what they are. The person is saying got to and going to but pronouncing them incorrectly -- too fast and running them together. If you use gotta and gonna (and its vicious cousin gotcha), you'd better be prepared to drop pretty much every g at the end of -ing words or write 'em instead of them almost every time, because that's the exact same thing. And when you start doing that, yes, you wind up making people look stupid in print. And that is not "cleaning up" a quote because you are simply writing what the person actually said, just as if you wrote "doing" instead of "doin'."

At our shop, there is an ironclad rule that I am totally on board with: no gonnas or gottas. We had a writer here for a short time who invariably had at least one of those in just about every story. He was here less than a year but I cannot begin to count the number of times I called him to explain that at this paper, gonna and gotta do not get into print. That's our style. Then he'd put two more in his next story.

 

Couldn't disagree more. When I say "gotta" I am not saying "got to." Same with "gonna." I mean, take a second right now and say "going to." Speed it up or slur it all you want, it doesn't come out "gonna." And one of my biggest pet peeves about quotes is when I see something like, "We got to get the problem fixed in practice this week." As soon as you read that, you know the person said "We gotta get the problem fixed in practice this week." If a newspaper's style is to never use gonna or gotta, I'm fine with that being the newspaper's choice. But change "we gotta" to "we've got to" or "we have got to." Changing it to "we got to" sounds far more awkward than "we gotta."