Worst lede ever

SPUNKTOWN — COCKDIAN Charmions easly werent stopped like Kobe and LeBron and provocked narly plays by beating the other team last night.

 

Years ago at the bigger paper in a two-paper county.
Stringer wrote an immortal lead....

"It was a game that could have gone either way and very nearly did."

 

Who was their stringer -- Yogi Berra?

 

"The Local College volleyball team played like their evil twins who had never even seen a volleyball in a loss to the not-so-local college on Friday night."

She also put in there that the game was "witnessed by 1,500 pairs of eyes."

 

There is an old Lewis Grizzard story from his days as an editor at the old Atlanta Journal where he supposedly got a prep gamer that started along the lines of "Podunk High's victory over East Podunk Friday was somewhat marred by the death of Coach Joe Cadaver."

Grizzard is said to have circled the led and written in red pen "Somewhat???"

 

God, I wish I could tell mine, but it would out me so bad ....

Needless to say, this lede is legendary at one of my previous stops.

 

One from the local decent-sized daily that we particularly enjoyed several years ago in the college newsroom, on a rowing event:

Oh, on the banks of the Podunk River.

 

Sirs, Madames,

Outside, the skies cried for Mario. (Not Dickie Dunn, but close.)

It's over and to a man they know it. (Written about the Senators before they made a late-season run to make the playoffs for the first time.)

YHS, etc

 

What a difference a thread makes!

 

"The Local College Team bombed from outside like US planes over Iraq."

I shit you not.

 

Presuming this is football, then the use of "somewhat" anywhere in the old Confederacy or Ohio is correct.

 

"Had the object of the game been water torture, the patient would have already bled to death." — asshat sportswriter driving to describe a game that went to multiple overtimes.

And from the news side:

"Prehaps (sic) the most tragic thing about the death of James Dever was, had it happened an hour earlier, he would still be alive." — douchenozzle news writer's lede about a guy who was killed when a truck ran off the road and through his office one morning.