Dan Wetzel on McCoy and Gilbert last night

[buckweaver]

Wetzel wrote books, did freelance, worked at a website called HoopsTV.com, then was at Sportsline (which I'm surprised people don't remember) then was one of Yahoo's first hires. One of my favorite factoids about him, though, was that he dealt cards at a casino in Michigan for awhile to make ends meet in between journalism jobs.

Thanks, DD. Wasn't aware of all that.

 

[JackReacher]

http://thebiglead.com/index.php/2006/11/28/from-casino-dealer-in-detroit-to-yahoo-sports-columnist-an-interview-with-dan-wetzel/

Nice. I still have a chip from Greektown Casino from a few years ago when I was up for a friend's wedding. Pretty sure the friend also worked with Wetzel somewhere along the line.

 

[funky_mountain]

wetzel, who is a good guy as well, also did a bunch of work for basketball times and his story on don haskins that ran in basketball times appeared in the 1999 edition of basw.

 

[SF_Express]

Wetzel was great at the former SportsLine covering college basketball and is a great guy, as well....Very caring about what he does, very professional, and a pleasure to work with.

 

[jfs1000]

What Wetzel does just takes time and patience. The problem with these big events is you get the bulldogs wanting to get a quote to put in their story. That's the business, but when the story is written before you talk to the subjects, are you really asking them what happened?

I hate writing like that. Some people love the fact they can pump out a good gamer in 30 minutes, plug in quotes and send. I know some guys who wear it as a badge of honor.

I just won't do that. I have done stories like this (not quite as good as Wetzel) and they kind of hit you over the head. Notice the time posted, it was 3:48 a.m. Well, that means he hung around the locker room to talk to people. Who does he talk to? Assistant coach? SID? McCoy's father? McCoy himself? Probably all of the above. The towel boy was there.

To be honest, it was probably a throw away line by someone, and Wetzel made the connection that he threw to his dad a million times and then he couldn't throw 7 yards.

Most people would take that quote and plug it into their story. Wetzel used that vignette and that was the story.

His genius here was recognizing the fact this All-American couldn't do something he had done easily for about 15 years.

Where did he start the reporting? He asked himself a simple question -- who was there witnessing what happened?

As an editor told me when I started this business when we were tracking down high school games by calling Aunts and Uncles at 11 p.m....someone was there, and someone knows what happened.

Once you find out who was there, seek them out, and the story writes itself.

I bet the column was written off less than 10 minutes of audio tape.

 

[Small Town Guy]

The always amazing William Langewiesche has a story on an Army sniper in the current Vanity Fair.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/02/sniper-201002

I thought of this discussion when reading this graf, as far attribution (lack of), or setting the scene at an event the writer didn't witness.

Crane had spotted another fighter in the distance. He was holding a radio, as if directing the attack, but before Crane could kill him, he ducked behind a large rock. Crane used a laser range finder—a device that he had brought from home—and measured the distance as 806 meters. That is the distance from Crane's stone house to the road in Texas, and then half again as much, plus some. Crane had been issued the army's standard sniper rifle—a 7.62-mm. bolt-action Remington M24, shooting a medium-weight, 175-grain match bullet and equipped with a fixed 10-power scope. He dialed an elevation into the scope to correct the aim for the ballistic arc at 800 meters, then braced the rifle on the hood of the Humvee, sighted it at the rock, and waited. Soon enough the gunfire ebbed and became sporadic. At that point, stupidly, the man behind the rock stood up to look around. Crane saw him clearly through the scope: he was a Pashtun, and in Crane's view a typical Hajji with a scraggly beard and a man-dress on. Centering the crosshairs near the man's groin to compensate for the tendency of rounds to go high when fired upslope, Crane squeezed off a single shot. The bullet flew for about a second and hit the man squarely in the chest, raising a little cloud of dust as it punched through the fabric of his clothes. He must have been surprised at being killed from so far away. He felt the blow and likely died before hearing the shot, the sound of which arrived three seconds later. He fell straight back like a firing-range silhouette, and did not rise again. At 806 meters it was Crane's longest kill in combat. He pocketed the spent cartridge, the "kill brass" that had done the job. No Americans had been hit. A few Afghans in the convoy had been wounded, but none had been killed.

The whole story's worth a read.

 

[JackReacher]

Thanks for the link, STG. Gotta check that out.

 

[Mighty_Wingman]

Before I read the story, I've got to mention: The header on vanityfair.com says "Febraury 2010." I'll admit I had a moment of schadenfreude.

 

[jaredk]

The always amazing William Langewiesche has a story on an Army sniper in the current Vanity Fair.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/02/sniper-201002

I thought of this discussion when reading this graf, as far attribution (lack of), or setting the scene at an event the writer didn't witness.

Crane had spotted another fighter in the distance. He was holding a radio, as if directing the attack, but before Crane could kill him, he ducked behind a large rock. Crane used a laser range finder—a device that he had brought from home—and measured the distance as 806 meters. That is the distance from Crane’s stone house to the road in Texas, and then half again as much, plus some. Crane had been issued the army’s standard sniper rifle—a 7.62-mm. bolt-action Remington M24, shooting a medium-weight, 175-grain match bullet and equipped with a fixed 10-power scope. He dialed an elevation into the scope to correct the aim for the ballistic arc at 800 meters, then braced the rifle on the hood of the Humvee, sighted it at the rock, and waited. Soon enough the gunfire ebbed and became sporadic. At that point, stupidly, the man behind the rock stood up to look around. Crane saw him clearly through the scope: he was a Pashtun, and in Crane’s view a typical Hajji with a scraggly beard and a man-dress on. Centering the crosshairs near the man’s groin to compensate for the tendency of rounds to go high when fired upslope, Crane squeezed off a single shot. The bullet flew for about a second and hit the man squarely in the chest, raising a little cloud of dust as it punched through the fabric of his clothes. He must have been surprised at being killed from so far away. He felt the blow and likely died before hearing the shot, the sound of which arrived three seconds later. He fell straight back like a firing-range silhouette, and did not rise again. At 806 meters it was Crane’s longest kill in combat. He pocketed the spent cartridge, the “kill brass” that had done the job. No Americans had been hit. A few Afghans in the convoy had been wounded, but none had been killed.

The whole story's worth a read.

No attribution necessary here; anyone who has read the first 2000 words knows the source of this graf's information.

 

[da man]

What Wetzel does just takes time and patience. The problem with these big events is you get the bulldogs wanting to get a quote to put in their story. That's the business, but when the story is written before you talk to the subjects, are you really asking them what happened?

I hate writing like that. Some people love the fact they can pump out a good gamer in 30 minutes, plug in quotes and send. I know some guys who wear it as a badge of honor.

I just won't do that. I have done stories like this (not quite as good as Wetzel) and they kind of hit you over the head. Notice the time posted, it was 3:48 a.m. Well, that means he hung around the locker room to talk to people. Who does he talk to? Assistant coach? SID? McCoy's father? McCoy himself? Probably all of the above. The towel boy was there.

To be honest, it was probably a throw away line by someone, and Wetzel made the connection that he threw to his dad a million times and then he couldn't throw 7 yards.

Most people would take that quote and plug it into their story. Wetzel used that vignette and that was the story.

His genius here was recognizing the fact this All-American couldn't do something he had done easily for about 15 years.

Where did he start the reporting? He asked himself a simple question -- who was there witnessing what happened?

As an editor told me when I started this business when we were tracking down high school games by calling Aunts and Uncles at 11 p.m....someone was there, and someone knows what happened.

Once you find out who was there, seek them out, and the story writes itself.

I bet the column was written off less than 10 minutes of audio tape.

It's easy to say you won't bang out a quickie story and plug in a quote -- until you have 40 minutes to run down, grab a quote and file before deadline. What you call the genius of this story isn't that he recognized something no one else figured out -- that, as you said, McCoy was unable to do this simple thing he'd done a million times -- it was that Wetzel had the time and to do that reporting and find the right people so he could set the scene. And he did a terrific job of that. But the vast majority of writers at that game never had the chance to get that story. They were merely blowing and going, trying to get something in by deadline.

BTW, I think I'm wth jaredk here. It sure reads like the writer was there. Assuming he wasn't, a "said" would have helped immensely without interrupting the flow.