Hooker and beavers, or, another headline fail

Or, another chapter in Why Copy Editors Matter:

Hooker High School Basketball Team Gets Hilariously Embarrassing Headline

 

After reading about the headline, I think having a school named Beaver use the nickname Dusters is worse.

 

I grew up in a region that included schools named Licking and Climax Springs.

 

I'll bet there's 100 years of hilarity in that newspaper's microfilm. Hooker and Beaver are near each other in the Panhandle and there isn't much in between.

 

COCKS
POUND
BEAVERS

(When does South Carolina play Oregon State in ... something?)

 

We once ran the headline "Ruler can't measure Johnson's impact" on a story about Damaris Johnson, who is small for a football player, when he was at TU. No one who saw it on the desk thought anything. Next day I saw it and cracked up.

 

With Beavers and Trojans, lots of potential for headline embarrassments in Pac-12 country.

 

I've shared this here before, I put a headline on a USC football season round-up in the Larry Smith days reading "Smith's Trojans endure season of ups and downs."

One of the guys in paste up noticed it and we changed it.

 

While attending a newspaper conference one year, someone leading a seminar said the best headline writers usually have the dirtiest minds.

At that point I knew I'd be a great headline writer.

 

That's the genius of it. If someone objects to a headline, you can just tell that person that they're the one with the dirty mind.

 

One of the great tragedies of our time is that both schools have won baseball national championships in the past decade, yet have never even played in the same College World Series.

 

When North Carolina beat Oregon State in the CWS about 10 years ago, a Mississippi newspaper ran with ... Tar Heels Trim Beavers