Complaining parents - When did this trend start?

Sirs, Madames,

I actually had the father of Jeff Ware, then a Toronto Maple Leaf "defenceman," not only complain but threaten to have my job snuffed by the publisher. Ware pere advised me that he and said publisher were university classmates. When I last spotted Ware a few years later, he was playing for the Florida Panthers, then the league's worst team and, on an eight- or nine-game losing streak and with eight regulars out of the line up, the Panthers were sending him down to the AHL. Long gone. Leafs liked him better than Petr Sykora.

YHS, etc

 

You can't talk about complaining parents without referencing Bonnie & Carl Lindros.

They set the gold standard.

 

This thread and the reference to bad sports parents got me thinking -- whatever happened to Mikhail Marinovich, Marv's latest project?

Not sports, apparently:
http://modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=415269

 

I don't believe this is anything new. But it has increased more in the last 10-15 years, it seems, with what someone stated earlier as a "local" push in newspapers and now with the Internet.

I attend my kid's practices because I enjoy the hour or so break, can help out if the coach needs it and I am protective. Not over-the-top protective, but if I dropped him off, they cut loose early and some weirdo nabbed him then I would be totally off the chart.

I attend as many games as I can by rescheduling things or cutting trips short when possible. Kids grow up too fast and I don't want to miss things. If that means leaving for a trip at 9 p.m. instead of 5 p.m. so I can see a game, so be it. My parents came to my games and it meant a lot.

As for parents complaining, I think it comes from the "I deserve this" mentality they try to foist on their kids. "You play hard - you deserve your name in the paper!" The parents are spoiled and the kids are spoiled, with physical things like $300 bats and emotionally with desires to see every little thing put in headlines.

Win a championship. Catch a touchdown or eight passes for 138 yards instead of one for 17 and you might get in the paper. Be consistent. Hit 38 straight field goals. Go 4-for-5 with seven RBI instead of making three routine plays from second and you might get in the paper.

With all the "citizen journalism" bullshit preached by some editors, it may get worse when Muffy's parents send in their own information and then complain about why it didn't get published the way they wrote it.



As an aside, I find it interesting in this age of dying newspaper circulation, there still is a heavy desire from people to see their name in print, to have a "legitimate" record of an event, to have something for a scrapbook or refrigerator door instead of an event chronicled on a Web site or an 8x10 sheet of paper with an Internet story printed off a newspaper Web site.

People ask "When will this be in the paper?" They don't ask if it will be online. The few times I've said something about it being in a blog, they look like I have told them I shit on their doorstep.

Sorry for the tangent.

 

I once had a coach at an inner-city magnet school blame me for racism because I didn't cover his district wrestling meet (I was at another one assigned to me).
This was four days after I wrote my only allowed feature story of the year on one of his wrestlers that got about 30 inches in a frickin' metro.

Everybody complains. Just in their own unique way.

 

You've been both a mommy and a daddy? Who knew? ;D

 

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Now, I didn't work at papers 20, 30, 40 years ago. But I get the distinct feeling that if someone had called asking for this sort of thing, he/she would have been met with a short, clipped laugh and a dial tone. Papers simply didn't put up with this crap.

Nowadays, though, more and more papers are adopting the inane philosophy that the day-to-day happenings of life are news. No. They're. Not. If it happens to everyone, day in and day out, it's not news. We've gone from arbiters of what's important to the customer-service desk at Target. "The customer is always right" is a bad philosophy at Wal-Mart. It's far worse than that at a newspaper.

I'm in my mid-20s, and I played two ridiculously bad years of baseball about 15 years ago. If I'd seen any reference to that in any newspaper, even as an 11-year-old, I would have laughed my ass off. At my first paper, a weekly, I had to cover middle-school sports occasionally. I always got the idea that the parents were perfectly happy to see me there, but that the kids were kind of going, "Um...why are you here?" And in fact, I've gotten that same vibe at HS soccer games, volleyball matches and even the occasional football game.

 

never thought of it along those lines, but damn, you kinda nailed it as far as my experience goes, too.

 

any bitches, colton?

 

Ha. We can always tell whether a parent actually subscribes and reads the paper or not. We published our football magazine on Wednesday. Had at least 10 people come in looking for "that pigskin thing you guys run every year." Despite the fact that we promoted it every day for a week and the fact that we quit calling it the "Pigskin Preview" (because when we took over we thought the name sucked) five years ago.

One mother called us in tears because we were biased against her son's team and never wrote anything about those kids. This, despite the fact that the star QB of that team is on the goddamn cover and the focus of the main feature. There are also two other stories about this team because it's the big fucking deal this year. Found out she was pissed because Coach bumped him to JV and we only run varsity rosters, so we didn't print his name.

Obviously, we were in the wrong.

Fucking hell.

 

Now, more than ever, we're becoming pro bono shrinks because of stuff like this.

"But you gotta understand, they cheated Johnny out of a spot on the team! CHEATED!"