Another discussion on how to quote athletes

Maybe someone who has been around longer than I have can explain this one: How did Moses Malone's "fo fo fo" quote come to be widely accepted? The verbatim made it legendary, but wouldn't the same rules have forced a change? I've heard stories of some papers that changed it to "four, four and four more."

 

No, that would have been exempted in my thinking because it added to the story. Of course, where to apply those exceptions is part of the whole problem.

 

As much as I respect you, you're dead wrong. (And I proved it by cleaning up your quote).
If we didn't clean up quotes, we'd never use them, because the pauses and ums and likes and tangents and incomplete sentences would make the vast majority of athlete quotes -- and a large percentage of coach quotes -- completely useless.

 

True. And when a few people started using tape recorders, we often mocked them. Of course the recorders were the size of a lunch box then.

One place had a rule that you'd quote pros and scholarship athletes verbatim, clean up otherwise. That's a fair rule. And I think most people understand when you're just taking out a little garble and extraneous profanity or "ya knows" and when you're becoming someone's speech writer/therapist. Common sense has to apply.

"So you're covering the Special Olympics ... get lots of quotes!" A boss actually said that to me once in the '70s. Or at least that's the gist of what he said.

 

You can't pick and choose. If you're gonna clean up quotes for one person, do it for everyone. If you're gonna run a quote as is for one person, do it for everyone.

I tried not to clean too much up in my quotes. I felt by doing so, I wasn't giving an accurate portrayal of the person.

And sometimes, the "ya knows" and such can help enhance the story. Depends on the story and who you're quoting.

 

You seem to contradict yourself:

 

You left out part of my quote in the last part.

Sometimes, the "ya knows" can enhance a story....IF you leave it in there. If you're a reporter that likes to clean up quotes and such....well, it likely won't enhance your story.

And honestly, it's a tricky thing, the whole cleaning up quotes issue. Even if you're a guy who likes to run everything verbatim, as I was, you still get the urge to clean 'em up once in a while. It's not a perfect science by any means. I tried to at least be consistent. Sometimes, I failed. It happens.

 

All right, Ryan, you're saying something different than what I thought you were saying. I thought you meant leaving the "ya knows" would be situational.

I don't agree that they'd enhance the story more often than very rarely, though. If the "ya knows" are necessary to let the readers know that the story's subject is a teen-ager who is uncomfortable talking to reporters -- sorry, there are more economical ways of doing that from the reader's standpoint.

Really, unless you're running a Q&A, you are editing a conversation by choosing which sound bites out of a 15-minute (or six-hour) back-and-forth you're going to use. Thus the old "quoted out of context" thing. You can't achieve 100 percent purity in a traditional story form. Simply by what you choose to quote and what you don't, there's a filter. Now there's a difference between trying to rein in all-over-the-place rambling for clarity's sake and willfully altering what's said to the point that it becomes fiction. And there has to be human (fallible) judgment involved in that.

 

Yup. Like I said, it can be a tricky issue.

 

Back when I was in university, I was covering an event alongside a veteran reporter from a major metro. She was telling me about "cleaning up" quotes for subject-verb agreement and stuff like that, to not make your subject look ignorant. Made enough sense to me at the time.

I asked a journalism professor about it and he also didn't bat an eye. So I've been doing it for years.

The bottom line is people talk differently than they write and print media is different from broadcast. My aim has never been to embarrass anyone, and so long as I keep the context of what is said, I don't see a problem. I've never had anyone claim that I misquoted them.

When I was an SID, I used to tell our student-athletes (and Moddy might understand where I am coming from) about the importance of talking in complete sentences. It's real hard for a reporter to quote you when all you say is "uh-huh" and "yeah, man, like the dude was trippin".