Worst game you have covered?

2003. Morris Brown at Georgia Southern for a three-game college baseball series.

17-7, 25-0, 17-1 (Southern wins, thank GOD). All three games were a pre-determined seven innings, I think out of mercy for Morris Brown.

It was near the end for Morris Brown. They recently went Division I (I-AA in football) and were about to suffer their demise due to an accreditation scandal. The baseball team may have not even finished out its season. It was pretty sad. I remember Morris Brown's jerseys looking like nothing more than T-shirts with ironed-on numbers, not much better than beer-league softball.

I was covering the series for our college paper. I also volunteered to operate the scoreboard, since I had done it a little bit during high school. In that second game, we were wondering what it would look like on the scoreboard if we were to score more than 9 runs in an inning, and we did it twice in the one game.

Those games were just miserable, and pretty pitiful for Morris Brown. A couple years later, after I left Statesboro, Southern hit 14 homers (still an NCAA record) in a 26-8 win over Columbia. That would've been interesting to cover.

 

As painful and unbearable as that all sounds, was it actually the worst game that you ever covered, or the worst you that ever covered a game?

 

A girls basketball game in the district tournament. One team was heavily favored, maybe ranked No. 1 in the state, so the underdog decided to stall. A girl literally was fixing her hair while she held the ball at midcourt - AND HER TEAM WAS LOSING BY SIX POINTS! Honest. After the game, I questioned the coach about the strategy, and she became offended. She was gay (no difference to me but to explain the person described next), so her "partner" wrote a letter to the newspaper's opinion page saying that I would never have questioned a male coach about his strategy.

I understand stalling when you are a big underdog, and I might even understand stalling if you are one or two points down, but to hold the ball for MINUTES when you are behind by six makes no sense to me - and this was in the fourth quarter! I would have asked John Wooden or any other coach that used that strategy.