Comebacks that kill your story

Just last night, covering HS baseball. They play 7 inning games. Home team was up 4-2 in the 6th inning, and the reliever had come in to start the sixth and had no trouble with the batters.

Same score in the top of the 7th, the reliever walks the first two batters and lets a pitch hang on the third batter who knocks it out of the park. They win 5-4. Luckily I had the bottom of the 7th to scramble to figure out who I was going to interview on the away team (they had 5 runs on 4 hits...).

It made for an OK story because I asked the kid what it felt like to hit that game winning home run and he goes:
"It was really hot. It's nice to get the win because we were ready to go home."

 

Anybody who covered the Final Four this year was royally fucked, and the NCAA didn't much help by setting a 9:20 p.m. Eastern tip-off.

 

Worked a D-3 national championship game in which the team I was covering squandered about an 18-point lead in the final eight minutes, lost on two FTs with :01 to play, even though half the gym thought the buzzer had already sounded by the time the foul had been committed but couldn't be sure because of crowd noise.

Spent the mandatory cooling-off period arguing with the clock operators, asking them to run the clock down from :03 to :00 so I could determine if they could have possibly heard the buzzer from the scorers table, as they had claimed. Spent 20 minutes cramming in player interviews, waiting out the refs and NCAA site rep for another 10 for their explanation.

Rewrote the top eight inches of the story, tacked on a new lede to the notebook and made the deadline for each by about 30 seconds.

Loved every second of it.

 

Yup. Strictly for deadline issues, Mario Chalmers wasn't my favorite guy at that moment. And the wireless headaches didn't help.

 

The SF Chronicle collected and printed several trashed leads from Game 6 of the 2002 World Series, when the Giants needed one victory to win the World Series and led the Angels, 5-0, with eight outs to go:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/11/03/SP110245.DTL&type=printable

 

I like the footnote on the next day's game, how the hell did Paul Abbott go 11-2?

 

The NCAA cares more about whether an athlete was given a free beer in a bar than sportswriters' deadlines.

 

That was a cool link. Thanks.

I really liked this one:

 

That happened with the second high school hockey gamer I wrote. I was all prepared to make some cheesy reference to it being a good week for Mannings (since the guy who scored two goals for the visiting team was named Manning and it was just after the Super Bowl). However, the home team rallied and got a goal with 1:07 left to win the game.

I didn't mind writing the new lede. It eliminated the cheese factor.

 

Actually, in this particular case, I think the NCAA cares more about getting prime-time ad rates for their pregame show.

 

Now, now, the NCAA doesn't care about making money. They believe in the purity of amateur athletics.