Dallas Times Herald - 20 years ago

The newspaper war between the Times-Herald and Morning News was one for the ages, especially in sports. Hell, the war between between Skip Bayless and Blackie Sherrod was up there, too. Fun times.

 

Good catch.
My bad. I knew Darrin and Dennis both.
They lured me into this crazy high school fantasy football league, in which I fared very poorly.

Good guys who were on the agate desk at the time. Years later at Rickey Williams' final college game, I ran into Darrin inside the Cotton Bowl press box.

 

DTH vs. DMN, for about the last decade of the DTH's existence, might have been the last great newspaper war. When it started, both were about even. Those at the DMN were told, basically, "two go in, one comes out." DMN ramped up sports and biz coverage and Dave Smith spent was able to spend a bunch of $ to make DMN sports what he wanted it to be.

 

Darrin's a great guy and good friend (though I haven't talked to him in ages -- need to do that). Our desks were right next to each other at the Star-Telegram's Arlington office back in the heady Arlington-newspaper-war days of the late '90s-early '00s. That was when the S-T's stand-alone Arlington section (The Sports Zone) had a beat writer for every public high school, as well as a private schools writer, a UT-Arlington writer (Darrin) and a columnist (that was me).

Of course, The Sports Zone has long since faded away and the Arlington office has closed.

 

Yeah, and the irony of the SMU story in the newspaper war was that the biggest story in the SMU scandal was broken by a TV sports anchor.

 

A couple of years ago Mickey Spagnola wrote a column on the Cowboys' site about getting the news that day. IIRC, he wrote that Jerry Jones quietly arranged for media credentials and travel expenses to make sure that Spagnola (and others) were able to keep covering the Cowboys through their playoff run.

 

I'm going to try and hold back going into a rant on this, but I and another reporter from one of the major DFW papers had been working the SMU story for weeks, digging through a number of leads and tips and chasing the story----at one point I literally chased an SMU player down the street after he got his weekly payoff where we had been tipped off and had staked out.

We were pulling a lot of the pieces to the puzzle together, but had not met the threshold needed to make the story publishable in terms of corroboration of sources and documentation. On top of that, one day while leaving the SMU area to head back to the office, I called my office from a payphone and get told by my sports editor that SMU AD Bob Hitch had called him complaining that the mother of a player's girlfriend had called the day after I had interviewed her, during which I asked her why a well-known player (from a family in poverty) was driving a new car registered to her daughter, that I had used a racial slur in talking about the player to her, which is an absolute lie.

I found out later that the Channel 8 (WFAA) producer who had jumped in on the developing story had called her close to the same time I did, and to this day I'm pretty sure that this channel 8 tv "investigating" producer---and this has long been a favorite tactic of TV "investigative journalists" to do confrontational interviews just to get a rise out of people---said something to her that may have been offensive, and she got us mixed up in squealing to Hitch. Scum "journalism", and I'm reasonably sure someone in this whole deal I had talked to turned around and handed Channel 8 the story.

Typical Hitch---cared more about trying to finagle getting a sports writer thrown off the story vs. cleaning up that dirty program.

The 30-30 piece makes Dale Hanson look like some crusading reporter in all this and ESPN gave him plenty of soundbites in the piece to pat himself on the back. Yeah, some sour grapes here I suppose, but I have a pretty good idea of how WFAA got that story handed to them, and my error was not getting all our sourcing and documentation tied up in time to beat WFAA to the punch.

All that said, I like the 30-30 piece and it brought back a lot of memories.

 

Not to thread jack, but I remember a great story from that time when both papers were chasing the SMU story.

Tim Kurkjian, as you might know, could look Muggsy Bogues eye to eye (OK, Tim's taller than that). Anyway, he had recently signed on at DMN. There was a hot tip about the SMU story and Tim was sent to Ron Meyer's house to askg him for comment. Tim knocks on the door, Meyer comes to the door. Tim says "Hi, I'm from the Dallas Morning News." Meyer says, "Just a minute." He comes back with this checkbook.

He thought Tim was the paper boy collecting.