Worst lede ever

No. I think that was John Wayne, not Shakespeare.

 

I had across many shitty ledes at my last paper, but these two stood out:

"I once was haunted by the ghost of a man named Bob."

That's from an outdoors column in which -- I wish I were kidding -- the author talks about what a great writer he is because he just won an award. Never mind that it took half the column for Bob's named to be used, and when it was the guy wrote "Robert," so you pretty much got through the whole column wondering who the Fuck Bob was (turns out it was a "famous" outdoors writer whom the writer admired).

"Let's get ready to rumble."

-- The lede to a wrestling gamer. We literally deleted the line and used the next paragraph as the lede. So after the next wrestling match, guess what the reporter used for his lede? You guessed it!

"Let's get ready to rumble."

Oi veh.

 

As Robin Williams once said "You're in more dire need of a blow job than any man in history."

 

Not sports, but I can't forget this one from a stringer on a sidewalk art event.

"When the British artist Sir Frank Dicksee painted "Romeo and Juliet" in 1884, he probably had no idea that a Somewhere City artist would enlarge and reproduce his work on am Ourtown street in 2004."

Probably? I think that's exactly what he was thinking.

 

The legend at the place I used to work centered around an American Legion baseball team and read, I think, "There was no Christmas for Podunk American Legion yesterday."

Or words to that effect.

The writer went on to quote the coach saying his team had no "Christmas."

Trouble was, he said "crispness."

Then there was the time the Sports Editor talked about "the sacks being inebriated."

 

From an outdoors writer:

I think that the first time I actually met (John Smith) was on a day I accidentally ran over his dog. The dog darted out of the bushes and was crossing the road headed home, and I hit it and killed it graveyard dead.

 

Had the game been at Brattleboro High, the coach may have been saying "no Christmas" because there was the Christmas family that produced decent athletes.

But that's neither here no there.

Reminds me of the Seinfeld bit "did you say the rines were crossed?"

 

Here are a couple prominently stuck in my noggin:

"I like fast women, but not on the basketball court" -- Saw that in the local daily while I was in high school. No doubt played some influence on my choice of careers.

"Joe Cuervo ran for 155 yards and four touchdowns as Back-40 Tech humped Dipshit U 62-0." -- That's what papers get when they employ desk guys whose idea of copyediting is to run spellcheck.

 

That bit of nonsense just sold me on the ledge. I'll never forget ''graveyard dead" now.

 

When Michael Kahn was busy fleeing Iran in the late '70s with his name attached to a death list, writing a fictional suspense novel was probably the last thing on his mind.

No shit! You think?

 

In a wicked good game ...

 

One of the oldtimers at a paper out west had quite the literary flair, sort of like the dialogue on Deadwood at times. The guy covered the Pacific Coast League team now and again; at the start of the season when he looked toward the unfolding hopes, he would write the team wanted to:
annex the PCL gonfalon

When he wrote about the error-prone shortstop and second baseman, he referred to:
the most porous portion of the inner cordon.

Still haven't been able to scrub them from the memory banks