Dear dimwit on the phone

That would be an awesome felony to committ! You know stores that honor circulars, so you design and print an entire fake circular, making all the deals look normal except the one you want, and you do the "Buy one XBOX 360 game, get the system free!" ad and take it to WalMart or somewhere. Haha.

 

Had an angry caller say I was biased and only taking pictures of the quarterback on a certain high school's team. The quarterback who is pretty much the entire team and scores at least three or four touchdowns every week. She claimed the offensive line intentionally didn't block in a game a few weeks ago because they were jealous he was getting all the attention.

Really.

 

Had a mom just ask why I ran a story without photos of her son she submitted. I explained I had space issues and had included them online.

She accepted the answer.

I'm not sure if her appreciation for the article was sarcastic or genuine or if there's another shoe that's about to drop. I'm not used to people being reasonable with their queries/complaints.

 

There's something that unnerves me about a 5-year-old with a firearm.

 

Oh, my. Has it really come to this? We're getting complaints about a high school (or is it little league?) water polo all-star team?

 

Petty jealousies. But I do make it a point to mention to our photographers that with teams we cover often, try to get shots of different people so we don't end up running the same kid multiple times in a row. Basketball seems to be the hardest because there are fewer players and the same players usually score the most game-in, game-out.

Question for the board from a real-life situation 3-4 years ago......

Top girls basketball team in the region's star player happens to be the daughter of our publisher. (Transferred in from California when dad got the publisher's job at the paper.) Legit D-I player (got a full scholarship at State U). Editor is worried about a "perceived" appearance of bias and conflict of interest. Orders us not to run any photos of her. OK, fine. But problem is she's the best player on the team and one of the two best in the county. Isn't that sort of reverse bias if we ignore her?

 

Yes

 

You report the news. Period. Doesn't matter of the publisher's daughter is scoring a triple double, or if five years later, her pic is posted in the poin files. Both are news.

 

Not work related, but this one's a doozy.

Missed the freelance boat for football playoffs over the weekend, but my younger cousin wanted to go see the local playoff doubleheader so we did. I should preface this by saying that I am in my mid-20s and my cousin is 16; this will come into play later.

The stadium was big (5-6,000) and we chose to sit on the permanent cement side for easier access to bathrooms and food, which made sense as we just wanted conveinence and had no team affiliation.

The second game matched up North and Podunk. North is the top team in the state, undefeated, and has two or three legit D1 guys. However, by the luck of the draw we were on Podunk's side of the stadium.

Early on it became clear that North would roll and led by 14 quick. So my cousin and I are talking about how good North's receivers were when a Podunk fan in front of us turned around and said, "You know if you guys want to cheer for North how about you shut the fuck up and go over to their side." He was in his mid-40s.

I tried to politely respond by saying that we were neutral observers and that North did have the best player on the field.

His response: "Either you shut the fuck up or I'm going to punch you in the face."

Later in the game when my cousin and I weren't talking football....just talking about anything the guy turns and says: "Jesus, won't you two shut the fuck up! Shut your goddamn mouth or I'm gonna punch you in the face."

He left in the third quarter as Podunk was getting mauled.

Classy folks they got in Podunk these days. Cursing out a teenager and a 20-something simply for watching a game, and we did nothing at all to antagonize him or anyone else around. Have any of you been a part of, or seen, anything like that?
The guy looked like a former player who I think thought could throw his weight around like in the old days.

P.S. North won 40-something to nothing.

 

More like he's campaigning. I detect a bit of "well, those out-of-town coaches don't know how good my kid is, but I bet the sports editor does, we'll show them!" Fine in theory, except for one thing: I really don't give a flying fuck who's on the team, just that I get the team at the same time as my competitors.

 

to

Agreed.

Had a similar situation when I got back into sports in 2008, where publisher's daughter was a key player on the basketball team (went on to play at a D1 school in the Rockies, where he was transfered after her sophomore year). I'd like to think it's because we both respected what each other did, we were able to confine business talk to the office and sports talk to the gym. One day he came in and let me know she'd been called up from the JV volleyball team midseason, and all I could think of to say was "If she screws up, I'm going to rip her ..." Mutual laughter.

 

The only thing missing from making it a Varsity Blues scene is if he would've been wearing his letterman jacket from 25 years ago.