Dr. V's magical putter

I'm just now reading this thread because I missed this story and all the uproar.

But in 2014 did a college-educated man on this board use "transgendered" as a verb? Saying he "transgendered into a woman?"

I sincerely hope the takeaway from this, regardless of what you or I or anyone else thinks they know about LGBT issues and the community, is that people will take the time to do research on a community when they are writing about a member of it.

 

I'm sorry, but do they deserve praise for "admitting" to a mistake once it was pointed out by hundred/thousands of people?

They saw the early criticism. They didn't say a word. No one at ESPN said a word. All the people who touted the article went silent. The author who was proclaimed how good it felt to block people on twitter fell silent.

Instead of blocking people, maybe he should have realized he had a problem shortly after the article went on line. But, he thought he had a BASW article -- LOL -- and became defensive.

 

Why is the fact that she was transgender fair game?

If it had turned out that she was a lesbian, who had been born a woman, would that be worth noting? All he had to say was that she had changed her name, and that was why she didn't appear anywhere prior to a certain date.

Instead, he made it seem like her gender was lie; something shameful, and freakish.

Her gender was not a lie. And, it was not something to be bandied about as part of what made Dr. V "mysterious".

 

Because when you say someone has been lying about who they were, you have to also say who they actually are.

I'm really conflicted on this one. The heart of the story was Dr. V was a liar about who she was and why she was qualified to have investors to pursue this putter. She lied about her family ties, her education and the rest of her credentials. Because she is a liar, the story then becomes what's the actual truth. Does that have to include her gender history? I think so, because it answers the question of who she was before she invented the Vanderbilt connection. If I recall the story correctly, her name before she adopted Vanderbilt was a man's name. You can't really get around that unless you start lying to your audience.

If someone was running a scheme where they claimed to be millionaire golf course designers starting a resort in Cabo when in reality they were caddies trying to do the same thing, if we found out, we would profile the heck out of their lives before they adopted their new identities because it's a key part of the fraud. This person is not who they say they are. In this case, the gender becomes caught up in the greater issues (this is really Dr. V's family, this is where she went to school, this is where she worked before adopting her new name) in a way that is probably inescapable.

It has to be handled much more delicately than it was in this story, obviously, because the gender itself is not part of that fraud - that line has to be very clearly drawn and carefully handled. But it is an inescapable part of who she was before she started claiming to be a Vanderbilt, and who she was before that is a key part of a story like this.

 

Bingo.

 

Yeah, what a terrible thing they did waiting through the weekend (the uproar on this article didn't happen until Friday). If they would have recognized the problems before, they would have not published it. That's why they apologized. You realize you're in the wrong and make amends best you can.

Maybe, just maybe, the folks that run Grantland really thought this response out and waited until the next business day (Monday) to make sure they got it right (something they didn't do with the first article).

It was thoughtful, insightful and an act of really admirable journalism to admit you're wrong. But it's not worth acknowledgment because it didn't fit into your idea of a proper timeline.

 

I just can't believe that story saw the light of day on Grantland's Web site.

First, it's not and I'd wager never was (as Christina Kahrl claimed in her piece) a story aimed at golf readers. The story was, at best, going to be a Gladwell-esque "outlier who's been screwed" kind of thing before it morphed into whatever the writer needed it to be to get it published. If Essay Anne Vanderbilt had a 3 handicap and was a lifelong golf enthusiast with some investment money for a putter -- regardless of her sexual orientation -- it wouldn't have been <i>solely</i> a story about how the putter works, and it may not have been a story at all. Gary McCord shilling for something is not, in itself, a story. McCord's probably played 10,000 clubs in his life. Some golfers carry different putters every other round. Hannan's assertion that clubs are essential to a golfer's success should come with this key caveat: Those fuckers could shoot 68 at Riviera with persimmon woods and a putt-putt putter on the right day.

Second, is the true (yet merely initial) focus of the story: <i>Man, look at the weirdo we found! A liar, too!</i> From Hannan's story:

<i>"Although there were times when I had been <b>genuinely thrilled with the revelation that Dr. V’s official narrative didn’t line up with reality</b>, there was nothing satisfying about where the story had ended up.</i>

More:

<i>What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself. Yet the <b>biggest question</b> remained unanswered: Had Dr. V created a great golf club or merely a <b>great story</b>?</i>

Writers who are genuinely thrilled that their subject is a liar -- at any time -- better be writing about someone of some consequence and villainy (a pol who smeared his opponent's resume only to be found lying on his own), or they're not being on the level with themselves or the reader. A writer should not want to be lied to, and significant lies, on a topic so inconsequential as a putter shilled by Gary McCord, are not a sign to plow ahead. Catching a liar is not a "great story" in itself. Often, it makes for a terrible story because it's impossible to know what it is true, and, sometimes, the lies can force the liars into compromising corners that <i>better damn well be worth forcing them into</i>; that is, some sense of public good. Remember the warranted outcry over To Catch A Predator potentially being the cause of a district attorney's suicide? That canceled the whole damn show and, at the very least, "child safety" was bandied about as a justification for having showed up at the guy's house.

What was at stake here? McCord's honor? Some investor's money that may well have gotten back one day?

The media should not be a goon squad of tattletales hunting down private folks who might have fibbed some in a private business deal, presuming we know the parameters of what would constitute a lie when you take an investor's money. Essay Anne Vanderbilt wasn't running for public office or representing anyone other than a putter she made.

Simmons even gives the game up in his apology letter:

<i>"I remember Rafe forwarding me one of Caleb’s early email exchanges with Dr. V — it might have even been the first one — and being spellbound by her eccentric language. I had never read anything like it. She was the perfect character for a quirky feature about a quirky piece of sports equipment." </i>

Essay Anne Vanderbilt was a <i>character.</i> The <i>perfect</i> character. Because she was <i>quirky</i> and <i>eccentric</i>.

More: <i>"We first reached the “Is it worth it?” point with Caleb’s piece in September, after Caleb turned in a <b>rollicking</b> draft that included a number of <b>twists and turns</b></i>

And that idea -- hey, here's a quirky character upon whom we can build some rambling, pseudo-philosophical piece about golf equipment -- is where the problem began.

I can imagine a seasoned editor -- an editor I've had before, that many of you have had -- regarding the background inconsistencies, the emails, the hit-and-miss conversations and axing the story on principle and instinct. It smells off. The public good is not at stake. Fuck it. Move on. Why get our ass in a sling?

But, then, that kind of editor doesn't see his publication as a pop culture happening instead of a place rooted in reporting. Or a place where the goal appears to be to exalt "young voices" at the frequent expense of the newsworthiness of the subject. Or a place where, if a kid doesn't write this specific story, he's gotta spend another three months weaving some existential tapestry (or NBA shot chart breakdown) worthy to be published.

The editor who does see those things -- who apparently fixates on them -- thought the story <i>didn't</i> have enough before a veiled threat and the subject's suicide, but that the story <i>did</i> have enough after that happened. Instead of nixing the story -- because, at that point, what an indisputable mess it was, over a fucking tiny putter -- Simmons proceeded to think something else about this story, and by extension, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, in a way that's dangerously smug:

The story was no longer about Essay Anne Vanderbilt. It was about Caleb Hallan.

<i>"For us, <b>this had become a story about a writer</b> falling into, for lack of a better phrase, a reporting abyss. The writer originally asked a simple question — So what’s up with this putter? — that evolved into something else entirely. His latest draft captured that journey as cleanly and crisply as possible."</i>

The top journalistic mistake to me -- because it persists <i>in the apology</i> -- is that, in Simmons' own words, the story had shifted from Essay Anne Vanderbilt's highly-and-purposefully-protected life to <i>Caleb Hannan's journey.</i> It was no longer Vanderbilt's life to protect, but Hannan's life to investigate. His journey had greater weight than her life. The subject is now what happened to the <i>writer</i>. And if Vanderbilt's identity was outed in the process, if a writer's pressing inquisition potentially pushed her to the brink of suicide, well, <i>lesson fucking learned man, but it happened to Caleb</i>.

The mistake, in Simmons' eyes, seems to have been that someone from the LGBT community didn't read the story. Yeah, well, they would have spiked the fucking story. They'd see what was obvious to see -- the writer inadvertently put Vanderbilt's identity and very life at stake, and her death didn't give him permission to finish the story. And the story wasn't anything worth reading without those details; Simmons said himself, in his apology.

So if she didn't give permission, and the story needs to have those details to pass Simmons' threshold, what paradigm can one use to shoehorn those details in? <i>The writer's journey</i>. The story thus wasn't about who Vanderbilt was -- or what she granted permission to have printed about her, which certainly didn't include her prior identity -- but what Hannan learned after Vanderbilt had, somewhat conveniently for his journey, paved the way for him to learn it with her death. (If she's alive, no way Grantland runs this.)

One of Simmons' main concerns was:

<i>"about NOT running the piece when Caleb’s reporting had become so intertwined with the last year of Dr. V’s life. Didn’t we have a responsibility to run it?"</i>

I'm not going to explore one interpretation of that line: That Simmons is conceding Hannan's reporting affected Vanderbilt's life in such a final way that "responsibility" includes revealing her most-protected secret. I don't think Simmons intended it like that.

So I'm going to suggest Simmons used the word "responsibility" just one time in the apology -- to frame what he thought Grantland's editors owed the writer. Not what the writer or the editors owed Essay Anne Vanderbilt.

I'm a critic of Grantland, generally. I don't think it's evil, just scattershot and bloated, too much opinion, not enough care given to subject. No, the writer's lens isn't nearly as important to me as it appears to be to Grantland, and in the ways that it is important to me, I prefer a sublime touch and greater care shown to the subject than the aspirations of publicity. The site's long been a repository for navel-gazing, experiential essays that attempt to blow up a minor observation or fact into a symbol, an emblem, a Big Thing, as the writer sees it. Most of the time, this amateur philosophizing just reads like the unnecessary padding that it is.

The notion got Grantland's ass in a sling this time and hopefully it leads to a re-prioritization.

 

http://www.falconerfuneralhome.com/book-of-memories/1697018/Vanderbilt-Essay/service-details.php

"General Information
Full Name Essay Anne Vanderbilt (Krol)
Date of Birth Sunday, July 12th, 1953
Date of Death Friday, October 18th, 2013"

Note the the funeral home INCLUDED Krol (male last name before she legally changed it), but did NOT include Dr. (which she was not).

Are the inclusions/exclusions insensitive?

 

Deadspin's (not ESPN or Simmons' biggest fans) with a thoughtful look at all the issues here: http://deadspin.com/how-grantland-screwed-up-the-story-of-essay-anne-vander-1505368906

 

From the Deadspin piece:


"You won't find an answer in Simmons's characteristically self-obsessed, if searching, apology, in which he spends a bit more space talking about the ambitions he holds for the site, and a bit less about Vanderbilt, than is really necessary. <b> It serves as an extension of the site's premise, which is that the principal appeal of sports is that sports are what sportswriters write about, and that therefore their doings are of more significant appeal to readers than those of their subjects. </b> This fixation leaves a gap in Grantland's apology that resembles the one in the original piece, a hole suggesting a set of questions that aren't quite answered."

More: "This particular breakdown, though, was a fractal of the Grantland problem in general, which is to say the Bill Simmons problem. <b>It has to do with a set of ideas: that function is a pleasant but in the end unnecessary corollary of form</b>, that the point is less the product than how it's perceived, and that success on a large enough scale is self-justifying.

 

Bullshit.

Hannan tweeted a link to the article at 6:41AM on Wednesday. While the uproar didn't reach a crescendo until Friday, their was negative reaction to it right from the start.

But, all the people Hannan and Grantland cared about -- other writers -- loved it. They said it was the best article they had read in a while. People were suggesting it should win awards.

That made it easy to dismiss the early critics as "haters" or oversensitive. Besides, they were defending a freaky, transgender, con man. WHo cares what they think.

By 10:25 on Wednesday, Hannan tweets this: Text message from friend: "Any death threats yet? Or can I be your first?"

Ans in response, at 12:06 on Wednesday, someone tweets in response, After reading the article, I think you just drove a depressed person to suicide. Good job man. Hope you are proud of urself

https://twitter.com/RomanP11/status/423546732681494528

Let's not pretend that they were unaware of any controversy until Friday.

And, let's not pretend that ESPN didn't order radio silence on the issue either. For two days Hannan thanked every writer who mentioned the article on twitter. When the criticism started to really roll in, he jokes about it, still not taking it seriously, then goes silent: Everything you guys have been saying is true: Blocking people feels fantastic.

And, then it was three days before we heard anything from anyone at ESPN. They silenced everyone.

Sorry, but Disney/ESPN is a huge company. They have PR people who are capable of working weekends if necessary. They didn't address it until Monday, because they didn't know what to say. They were so shocked that this great story -- a story praised by writers -- was being criticized.

And, so, they finally looked into the issues people had with the article, and issued an apology, five days after publication.

Congratulations.

 

Thoughtful take, Alma. Thanks.

This is not a defense of Caleb Hannan/Bill Simmons/Grantland/ESPN and by no means an indictment of Dr. V, but she had 2 choices 8 months ago: accept or decline the invitation.

A person 60 years into an anguished life opened the door and invited a reporter and his army into that life.