Best ledes

3/15/11

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona man has been sentenced to three years of probation for stabbing a man who refused to let him suck his blood.

 

3/15/09

NEW YORK (AP) — A woman walking on a Bronx street on Sunday was shot in the stomach with an arrow.

 

This lead from that game, written by Joe Trimble of the New York Daily News and a play on Larsen's frequent carousing, was really good, too. "The imperfect man pitched a perfect game yesterday."

I've heard that someone else (possibly Dick Young?) actually came up with it and Trimble used it.

 

OK, I know I’m tooting my own horn, but I just remembered perhaps my own personal favorite lede.

Covered a boys soccer playoff match in a quagmire of a downpour one night. Town it was in is called Whitewater.

Lede was: Technically, the match was played in Whitewater. Really, it was played in just water.

I’ll come up with some I remember from others.

 

Ok, one more I did that I liked, then I’ll stop. Covered a HS football games some years back. Small schools, winning team had an All-State QB named Da’Shaun Brown who was just fantastic.

Lede: Two football teams plays at Horlick Field on Saturday.

One was the St. Joseph Lancers.

The other was Da’Shaun Brown.

 

"If an experiment beneath Brigham Young's stadium proves successful, football could give yarn its biggest boost since Rosey Grier took up needlepoint."

 

Dan Jenkins profiled Joe Namath for Sports Illustrated when the Jets quarterback was at the height of his Broadway Joe stardom. His opening paragraph describing a most-eligible bachelor scoping out the young lovelies in a bar deserved a chef’s kiss.

Stoop-shouldered and sinisterly handsome, he slouches against the wall of the saloon, a filter cigarette in his teeth, collar open, perfectly happy, and self-assured, gazing through the uneven darkness to sort out the winners from the losers.

 

I don’t know about you, but if that thought came into my head midway through the story, I’d change and make it the lead. Somehow. But a guy like Murray had so many lines that he could bury it.

 

This reminds me of a passage an overly ambitious county reporter
tried to get past the copy desk one night. His prose died fast and hard.

“Still, many gather at the Podunk market,
hoping their cattle will fetch a higher price.
Some of the animals are silent; others
moo loudly, as if realizing they're not
bringing in enough money to pay the bills.”


It hangs on my wall to this day, though.