DID WILBON GET DUPED BY JOHN THOMPSON?????

We're a laughable business when the most important sportswriting jobs, the column slots, get treated like entitlements to immediately work less and chase second or third jobs in other media. I'll take a guy like Bernie Lincicome any day, who has never whored himself for a few more bucks. Bernie might not be a bulldog reporter or 50-hours-a-week guy -- maybe there are better examples -- but at least his newspaper job never has taken a back seat to some easy-money moonlighting deal.

The only thing worse than writers who do that are the bosses who allow it.

 

Amen. Joe Posnanski is a better example.

 

W/all due respect FH, I think many of us on the board have worked with particular sources for an extended period of time. I have. Some of the relationships have been pleasant; some not so much.

Yet no matter which one, I've always at least made an attempt -- phone call, e-mail, smoke signals -- to give the other side an opportunity to speak.

Even if I get a "FU, no comment," I've done my job.

If this was not a case of being a bit lazy, it was something even worse.

 

Here's some reporting from Whitlock's Fox Sports column:

"He told us not to trust in (white people) and that they weren't trying to help us," said Peyton Stovall, Ball State's second-leading scorer. "He told us that on many different occasions. I don't know if he had a reason why, but it just came out. We'd be in a meeting or at his house or something and it would just basically come out of nowhere. I thought he had prejudged everybody before he got there."

Thompson, according to Stovall, was also pretty liberal with the use of the N-word with his team. Thompson's players were all black. He had one white assistant coach.

"Practice, games, normal talking, whatever," Stovall told me. "He wouldn't use it every single day, but if you would just talk to him he'd use it, especially if you used it. It was kind like he was one of the boys. ... He would tell (the white assistant) to close his ears."

 

Jason Whitlock's take on it went up on FOXSports.com this morning:

http://msn.foxsports.com/cbk/story/7127682

 

I'm a big Posnanski fan, too. One of my favorite writers ever. He writes short sentences. He writes declarative sentences. He makes people like sports.

That said, I like Whitlock, too, but for completely different reasons. And I don't think we should be blasting the multimedia inclinations of sports columnists. That's where the business is heading. Narrative sports writing is over.

 

Of course, there's a couple major differences. Zaleski is not making misrepresentations of fact without verification, instead he's correcting Wilbon's misrepresentations. And Zaleski actually does know and has spoken with BOTH sides on quite many occasions; unlike Wilbon who apparently wrote his piece from one self-serving account given in a meeting with just Thompson.

 

Whitlock is my hero.

 

His, too.

 

Wilbon did not whore himself for a few bucks, he gets 7 figures a year from ESPN and based on his success there, he should continue to reach that sum, yearly, over and over and over.