Kindred on Albom receiving this year's Red Smith Award

The degree of self-serving, defensive horseshit inherent in the Dwarf's
public posturing exemplified within the above quote is hysterical.

Oh, yeah, he was fighting the good journalism fight, filing a presumptive column in the blithe expectation he wouldn't be called on it because . . . hey . . . he's Mitch Albom.

The inherent delusion speaks volumes.

 

I seem to remember that back when the whole "The Five People You Meet in St. Louis" fiasco broke, people who had covered the Olympics said Albom would stay back in the media center, send his underlings out to events to get quiotes and then write his stuff as if he had been right there in the scrum. Anybody who has covered the Olympics know about that?

 

I covered Olys he was at, back when we both worked out of the Knight-Ridder Olympic office (sigh). I would like to say I saw that, but I didn't. Did wonder how he got his column written when every time I saw him, he was carrying around his radio recorder, taping stuff for his show. Never actually recall seeing him in a scrum. If I had seen him in a scrum, I am confident he would not have acknowledged me, even if we had spent the previous two hours sitting across from one another in the same office, as we did a few times.

 

Winning awards is what Mitch Albom does, year after year, decade after decade, so this one was inevitable whether it was now or they give it to him in 2020, or they don't get around to him until he is dead like the selectors have done with some honorees. You can't not eventually give that recognition to somebody who dominated the APSE column category for so long.

Of course it's subjective; all journalism awards are. When Dave Kindred won his Red Smith in 1991, he was probably the youngest winner at that point (unless it was Dave Smith). Certainly he already had a very strong body of work, but it's also true that Kindred won before some people who had been at it much longer and who had accomplished as much as or even more than Kindred had at that point. Dave Anderson, for instance, had already won a Pulitzer, something sports writers seldom do, yet Dave Kindred got his Red Smith a couple years sooner. I doubt there was an objective basis by which Kindred was deemed more deserving than Anderson and should win a Red Smith before him. They just gave it to him when they gave it to him. You could argue that the selectors easily could have waited a decade or two on Kindred. You could argue that some of the selectors probably knew Kindred better than they knew some of the other people they could have honored in 1991. You could argue that it's rushing things to give what is essentially a lifetime achievement award to someone who probably was only about 50 at the time, especially when only 10 other people in sports journalism history had been given the award by then. We can quibble. But it's just an award and, if not in 1991, Kindred likely would have been honored by now, anyway.

Bottom line is the defining characteristic is supposed to be "major contributions to sports journalism." Dave made those. But by that standard, Albom should have won a long time ago, maybe not in 1991, but arguably years before that Final Four column.

I do not believe Albom's gaffe should be held against him for an eternity. Unlike most people who make up shit, he was not attempting to build his clips or put one over on his bosses; anyone who saw the column before publication in a Sunday preprint section would have been fully aware of what he was doing unless they were brain-dead. He just made a bad decision about how to overcome a bad deadline and apparently no one called him on it until it was too late.

Of course Albom has gotten a pass on some things that other writers would be called on. Unfortunately, that sometimes goes with the territory. If everyone were edited the same way, someone at the National Sports Journalism Center would have told Kindred he should whack the first five graphs of that column because they don't serve any purpose. Dave Kindred gets to meander into a column because he's Dave Kindred, even though someone ought to point out things the same way a batting coach doesn't ignore a minor flaw just because it's someone who has been an All-Star. You notice what you notice and you say so, or at least that should be the system if you are concerned about setting an example for journalism students who may become editors someday. Is Dave unedited there by decree, or is it more of a de facto no-edit because some people are reticent about suggesting changes to a prominent writer?

 

Let's remember that Albom didn't vote himself to all those awards (though he might have wanted to). The APSE fanboys did it.

I have encountered way, way too many sports editors in this business who all end up drooling over the same handful of stars and hot commodities, to the point that their embarrassing devotion becomes in-bred. If these so-called journalist/managers can't draw the line on someone who so famously has made a mockery of the standards of the business, what is the damn award worth anyway? Albom should get no closer to a Red Smith Award than Pete Rose or Rafael Palmeiro get to Cooperstown.

So many of their newspapers companies are becoming irrelevant fast, but somehow the groupie SEs managed to render themselves and their contests/awards that first.

 

Bravo. Any editor with a set of stones would have not allowed that Final Four column to run. Then again, nobody at the Freep has the stones to tell Little Lord Mitchelroy that he was wrong.

 

Totally agree with Joe Williams. APSE's fascination with Albom's columns always befuddled me. When he started winning the best column award and I started reading his stuff, I was stunned to read a column that ran in the 30-40 inch range. Other columnists were confined to 15-18 inches. Fine and good, life (and journalism) isn't fair. But Albom would spend his space beating a dead horse, repeating himself for emphasis. I always have thought he over writes and is in love with his own keyboard.

And his 2005 Final Four column of shame: Indefensible and a fireable offense. Sure, he had to file something for Sunday's editions on Friday. But a high school journalist could tell you that writing about something that you THINK is going to happen is a bad idea that should be rejected as soon as it passes through the brain pan. We've all been put in tough assignments by editors and figured a way to "git 'er done." Albom played the superstar card and half-assed his assignment.

 

Any editor would have OK'd a column list that included a piece on Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson plans to attend a game.
I'm not so sure the hostility -- from journalists -- entirely stems from that one column.
I think the tide began to swell 10 years earlier against Albom when he crossed the picket line during a Freep strike that was in the national spotlight.

 

I said it way back then, and I'll say it now.

The MSU thing was wrong -- since he wrote about something ahead of time, and it didn't happen, it is simply impossible to argue otherwise.

BUT that column was as much a product of the Sunday pre-print system many newspapers have (or had) as it was of anything else. I agree with Frank: It was a low point, but the editors who allowed him to do it -- make no mistake, before this blew up in their face, everybody knew what was going on; it was business as usual -- were at least as much to blame. It was as simple as somebody saying, "Hey, Mitch, what if somebody misses a flight?" And nobody did.

 

Found this on thesimon.com from the MSU incident...

Albom is Mr. Hollywood. (Hank Azaria won an Emmy for portraying him in the television version of Morrie.) He only continued to write the column to feed the rest of his media endeavors, which included playwriting, serving as a vocalist and keyboardist in the novelty band the Rock Bottom Remainders, hosting a radio talk show, and lots and lots of face time on ESPN.

Because the column scored him the recognition that turned him into a multimedia powerhouse, he couldn't abandon it. So a couple times a week he sat down and typed a few words about this or that inoffensive subject.

Albom became a caricature — more of an entity than a columnist. He had multimedia opinions — something that could easily fill an hour on the radio, a spot on ESPN, and a Sunday column. Sound bites became columns, and columns became sound bites.

Enter carelessness. And when it did, the everyday newspaper grunts, always jealous of the super-columnist, were ready to pounce. Albom provided an easy target. Not only had he risen to the highest level of the journalism caste system, but he shat upon those below him. During a very contentious and long Detroit newspaper strike, Albom had the gall to cross the picket line. While the grunts sacrificed to enhance their plight, multimedia Mitch pecked away at his computer, worried only about enhancing his own.

I couldn't find the column when he crossed, but did find this in the NYT...

The Free Press said last week that it would start replacing Guild members who did not return to work by today. "Our offer to bring everybody back is not possible anymore," said Heath J. Meriwether, the executive editor of The Free Press.

The 124 Guild members who crossed the picket lines at The Free Press before the ultimatum had been joined by only one other as of today. But he was a significant one: Mitch Albom, a sports columnist who is probably the newspaper's best known and most popular writer.

Mr. Albom began his column about the strike today with one word: "Enough." He wrote that he would remain a member of the Guild and "give much of what I earn to the people still on strike."

But, Mr. Albom said in an interview, "Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down."

Mr. Albom, who tried to broker an agreement that would return strikers to work during negotiations, said that he thought both sides in the dispute were wrong and that he did not want to be seen as supporting either. "I didn't want to be waved as a flag," he said.

 

SF:
I would submit that no line editor said, "Hey, 20-second timeout here" because it was a Mitch Albom column and you don't eff with a Mitch Albom column.