Jeff Pearlman closes the door on John Rocker, and his guilt

It's a good read. Guilt has wracked his soul despite 15 years of praise and a meteoric rise in professional stardom borne from the John Rocker story in '99. On the social media he said it was "cathartic" to write it.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2009128-a-reporters-tale-the-john-rocker-story-15-years-later

 

This is awesome:

My only strong moment came midway through, when he said, "I even bought you lunch!"

"Actually," I said, "I paid."

"Well, f--k you...''

 

In the same vein I'd love for one of the big writers to do a retrospective about Rocker's first appearance at Shea after the suspension. The intensity was thick and made for great TV. He pitched a 1-2-3 inning and then his walk back to the dugout -- camera trained on him -- was so perfect. One of my favorite TV baseball moments.

 

Pushed the lede all the way to the bottom:

Except the Kangol hat. Perlman should feel guilty about that the rest of his days.

 

Is that really a kangol though?



At least in the sense of LL Cool J's kangol.



Looks like Jeff is just wearing a cabbie hat, or the cap Terence Trent D'Arby wore, backward.

 

They make Kangol cabbie-style hats, too. Samuel L. Jackson has worn them for years:

 

I had a Kangol cabbie style hat in college that I stole from an ex-boyfriend. That was 15-18 years ago.

 

That was probably my favorite line.

 

That was a really interesting read.

There's no question that article ruined Rocker's career. Does that mean it's Pearlman's fault that he wrote it? Of course not... If the article hadn't happened, Rocker probably would have melted down at some other time, but that's a guess.

It was interesting. When that article came out, if you asked journalists if Pearlman did anything wrong, you would get a lot of different answers. Our baseball writers at the time got into a huge shouting match over whether the article was fair. My assigning editor at the time, by far the best editor I ever worked for, said under no circumstances would he have run that article, which stunned me. When I read the article at the time, I didn't think Pearlman had done anything wrong, but I was stunned at how many people who I respected disagreed with that.

Is there really another instance when there's an athlete who is so closely identified with a writer and what was written about him? I can't think of one.

 

Pierce and Tiger comes to mind, but that's only within journalism circles.

DiMaggio and Talese, I suppose.

 

What the flyin' fuck.

It ain't the job of an interviewer to save the subject from himself.

Once you have clearly identified yourself to the subject as a journalist, if they start spewing, it isn't your job to save them.

End of story.

 

Not a guess. He's STILL melting down regularly. See his tweets at the end of the recent Pearlman article. Guy would have imploded no matter what.