What's the cringiest thing you've written?

it takes a pro to admit they whiffed - my own Yoda told me that long ago.

 

One of the first articles I’d written for my school newspaper was about the university’s club boxing team. A forgettable story that I likely would have forgotten myself, too, if not for ...

A few days after the article was published, I went out to the bar with friends. I was no older than 21, but felt like I was on top of the world and well on my way to The New York Times. I saw the coach of the team — an impressive and charismatic guy, chatting it up with tons of people — and went up to him to say, “Hey! How’d you like the article?”

He didn’t like the article. He claimed he was misquoted and gave me crap about it, really putting me in my place and knocking me down a few pegs. I stewed. But then I listened back to the recording and he was totally right. I didn’t change the intent of what he had said, but I totally butchered the verbatim quotes. I’m sure that coach hasn’t thought about me since that night, but I think often about how lucky I was to learn that lesson when I did.

 

All of it. I find something to hate in every piece I’ve ever done.

 

In a 36-year career, probably a lot of examples. I did not save my clips, so have very seldom re-read any of my stories.

Hit a lot of singles, many doubles, fewer triples and the rare home run. Luckily hit into only one or two triple plays.

 

Like every situation, there's something we could have done better. Something better we could have said. Something we shouldn't have said. Something we shouldn't have written ...

 

A couple of years after I moved to the desk, we ran short on reporters and I was pressed into service to do a couple of high school basketball previews. Really simple stuff — take the information on the forms we sent to coaches and write them up into some sort of narrative. I had done dozens of these in my sleep when I was covering preps, so I figured I could give an hour of my time to help get the basketball section done. I picked a couple of conferences from the fringes of our coverage area.

The form had a section on which the coach could note something like “key changes from last season,” and it listed a couple of names as “graduated” and a couple as “injured.” Working from the form, I wrote up a little tome about how conference favorite Podunk High was working to overcome having lost two starters to graduation and two more to injury.

Well, as it turned out, one of the injured had actually been injured, fatally, in a car accident over the summer.

We got a nice letter (back in day, when people wrote letters) from the coach alerting us to the error I had made. Along with the correction, we had another reporter write what turned out to be a very nice feature about how the team and the family and the town carried on after the boy’s death. And I learned a valuable lesson about not cutting corners and verifying all information, even the information that seemed to be fairly cut-and-dried.

 

Being a fill-in can often have disastrous results. The day before opening night, the prep editor was sick, so somebody else regurgitated the info from the football preview tab to advance the game. It mentioned a couple of standout players on the team. Another guy was thinking about future features and assigned a photog to shoot both of those guys. At the last minute, I was assigned to cover the game, although I wasn't a prep guy.

Near the end of the game, the photog came to me and said he couldn't find the two guys he was supposed to shoot. So I asked the coach. He launched into a profanity-laced tirade about how our paper was ridiculous, what we write is stupid, and on and on ... Turned out one guy transferred to another school a few days earlier and the other was the son of an L.A. Kings assistant coach who had just been hired by the Dallas Stars and moved to Texas.

I was stunned to be verbally attacked by a coach whose team had just WON a game against a stronger, bigger rival. I just took it, but I was so mad. The coach's brother was a replacement MLB umpire in 1979. I nearly said, "Fuck you and your scab brother too." But I didn't.

 

I found that many of my worst stories were always from the end of seasons, when I had run out of ways to write about another prep basketball or softball game. Mostly poor motivation on my part, but, lordy, there were some terrible teams and games I witnessed.

My regrets are not reporting — and thus writing — better than I did way back when. I still think of stories from my first job that I wish I could do over again.

 

Not writing exactly, but when I was working at a weekly we had volleyball photo overset one week and, hating to not use it, used it in the next week with that edition's volleyball roundup. It was then I found out the main subject of the photo had quit the team after the photo was taken.

 

We had a preseason photo day for each of our schools, so we had mugs to use throughout the season. The star QB for one school had this awful photo. He was black, his Afro was a mess. We whispered in the office that he looked like a gorilla. One day the phone rings. It's the guy's Mom. She asked we could PLEASE take another photo or her son. She said the one we have makes him look like a gorilla. Of course, we did. It is nice when people are nice.

 

We once had two genius football players who thought it would be funny to switch identities when we took mugs. One of their moms didn’t think it was so funny when one of the kids caused a car crash and the other one’s mug appeared in print.