AP hockey captions

Why do they put the country of non-North American players in the cutline like this one from last night?

 

Supposedly it aids the international papers that get the AP stuff.

And I think I'd like to change my first name to Kevork.

 

It's not just the hockey captions, it's any sport with mutli-national players. Even in some of the Tiger Woods cutlines, I saw "Tiger Woods, of the United States." I think DyePack is right on this one.

 

The funny thing is they go by your country of birth despite your citizenship or who you play for internationally, so you could get one (if you suspend belief for a second given that they play on three different temas) that says: "Dany Heatley of West Germany fires a shot on Olaf Kolzig of South Africa while Robyn Regehr of Brazil defends."

 

If Selanne, of Finland, is in the cutline, why not McDonald of Canada, or Kunitz of Canada. I'd think you'd want to identify all or none unless there's some significance becauss it's rare for a player from a given country to play.

 

Because you can tell they're Canadian just by looking at them.

 

Canadian and US papers are looking for NHL stuff every night (well, you know, whatever), so their interest is the game itself, not the cast of characters. Let's say a Kazakh paper with an AP subscription just wants to find out if there are any Kazakh players to run in its sports section for tomorrow, now it can search by "Kazakhstan," and get whomever.

(Yes, go ahead, insert Borat images here)

 

They do the same thing with NBA photos, such as "Utah Jazz' Andrei Kirilenko, of Russia, shoots during ... "

What really annoys me is when they say "Corey Dillon of the New England Patriots runs for a first down during the first quarter of an NFL football game on Saturday night."

 

Read the post directly above yours for the reason they do that. Of course, anyone who's been doing this for more than a month knows they can just use FBN for the NFL when searching the AP site.

 

I guess the reason it annoys me is our desk guys more often then not forget to take it out. I just feel it looks odd on a printed sports page.

 

Exactly. They're wearing sandwich-board signs that distinctly say "will play for paycheque"