Worst lede ever

There was a guy my co-worker used to work with who was writitng about a high school team called the sharks.
The lede was:
Dun-dun, Dun-dun, Dun-dun.
(The Jaws theme song typed out.)

 

I thought football was a game of yards.

 

Soccer is a game of feet (ducking).

 

BOOOOOOOO!!!

 

This wasn't in a lead, but it's still pretty funny.

A PT was covering a rookie-league baseball game for us on a Sunday night. He comes back from the game and writes his story. I'm reading through it and he's describing this absolutely meaningless home run hit by the opposing team that was leading 11-1 or something like that at the time. The PT writes that the pitch was erroneously placed. I didn't know a pitch could be erroneous, but I was corrected.

 

When I was in Hartford, a writer who covered the UConn women (who will go unnamed, at least from me) was covering the bracket revealing for the NCAA Tournament. The UConn women had apparently made it known that they HOPED they would draw Brown in the opening round.
They did.
And the lead.......Brown women, that's how we like 'em.

Nooooooo, did NOT make the paper.

 

Of course to me the best one (even though I was about 10 at the time) was the Austin American Statesmen's infamous lead on the Texas-Texas A&M game a couple of days after JFK's death. UT was ranked No. 1 and barely pulled it out.....the lead......Tommy Wade, as anonymous as a secret service agent all season long, stepped in and filed an assassination plot that almost took the life of another of America's No. 1 citizens. The University of Texas football team.

 

That's always been in my top (bottom?) 10.

 

Cutline at the first newspaper where I worked: "This file photo of an F-14 fighter plane is similar to the one used in the attack on Libya."

It made me wonder what the Pentagon budgeted annually for those fast, powerful file photos.

 

One more from Hartford.....our (at the time Red Sox writer) covered a Boston-Toronto game in early Sept. that gave Boston a solid edge in the division race. I don't remember the exact lead..but it was something like......
How boot dem Red Sox eh? Dey are in first place in the MeerKeen League East. The Blue Jays. finee!!!

The assistant sports editor who gave the story its first lead called him back and asked him to refile...when he asked why, she said it was garbled. Of course he had the nerve to be offended.

Sigh.....I loved much of the writing there sometimes.

 

These are just a few examples of who I 'compete' with on a daily basis...some of these are headlines, some are leads and some are just bad sentences.

"Wrestlers ready to roll:
‘Our pace is just sic ‘em’ "

"due to the overpowering, gritty attitude that has become intrinsic to MCHS wrestling."

"Six wrestlers attended states last year"

"Cheer, dance teams to bring Bulldog pride to States"


could anyone explain to me what 'STATES' are??? I mean comon' at least use the right word!

 

I'm paraphrasing this one from an infamous stringer at a paper in Michigan who had a lede quoted on an earlier post: "Even the best can have a bad day when they had to be at their best." This guy had so many ledes that could fit here that another worker at the paper used his material in a class about how NOT to write.