Comebacks that kill your story

I essentially pulled a "select all, delete" at the championship game.

 

Iowa-Indiana basketball game back in January. 8 p.m. start, so I'm writing after the Hoosiers go up by double digits late. Two minutes to go, I have everything pretty much done other than final score, stats and quotes.

Then Iowa guard Justin Johnson scores 19 points (six 3-pointers and a free throw) in the final two minutes. Although the Hawkeyes lose, they did have the ball with the chance to tie. I pretty much have to rewrite the whole story, because what he did was pretty impressive and that's all everybody was talking about after the game. Still got it done before deadline.

 

that was 1 p.m. game ... why would you even start writing?

 

I've seen a guy bring his laptop to a Sunday afternoon game and write as if he was on deadline. But his paper doesn't even have a Monday edition.

 

Hey, it was 35-3 in the third quarter. Why not get some stuff down for the early runs? But really, it actually was kind of fun. The Oilers' locker room afterward was a trip.

 

Hell, I'd do it just to prove that I can write on a daily deadline. I'm at a weekly that gets put to bed on Tuesday nights.

Actually, I was at a game a week ago Saturday night and the general manager of one of the teams asked me to e-mail him a gamer ASAP. I didn't bring my lap top with me because 1) I never do and 2) I didn't expect to be on that tight a deadline. I went to Kinko's and wrote the gamer. Beat deadline by about an hour.

If you're not at a shop that has the tight daily deadline, it's good practice to write as if you are on a tight deadline. If you get a gig at a daily and you're coming from a weekly, it's good to know that you can jump right in and write quickly on deadline.

 

Had a baseball game jack my story up not long ago... Oh well, thankfully it was in the afternoon.

 

Not a comeback, but my first big game assignment in my first job coming out of college was a high school game involving the defending state champions.

It was a night game.

I had about 25 inches to fill.

Score was 0-0, with one scoring threat the entire game.

 

¶ Jan. 4, 2006_Texas 41, Southern Cal 38


Must have written about 4,000 words that night, about 1,200 made the wire.

Remember getting back to the media hotel, sitting around a table with a bunch of worn out scribes. Can't remember who, but somebody said, "What a game. Too bad my story sucked." Everybody else just nodded their heads in agreement.

 

Yeah, but I bet your folo kicked ass.

 

I was at this game with my grandfather, and we left after the eighth inning. When the game was seemingly out of hand, we decided we'd stay until 11:00 (8:05 start for ESPN Sunday night baseball), and right around 11, Lofton got thrown out at home to end the eighth inning. The Indians were still down 4 or 5 runs, so we felt safe in filing for the exits.

I listened to the ninth inning on the radio driving home, watched the extra innings on TV in my grandpa's living room and have been hearing about it from just about everybody I know ever since.

 

During the Bucs' Monday night meltdown against the Colts a few years ago, some Orlando columnist (I think Jerry Greene, but not sure) had a column moving early on the Tribune wires, all about the genius of Gruden and how Dungy couldn't get over the hump against his old team. Whoops.