Interview with Jody Murphy

A few years ago, local high school lost a baseball game to go to state when the shortstop dropped a pop-up in extra innings. We ran his name and took several calls from pissed-off people the next day. They didn't understand that we had to tell how the team lost.

You use the name.

 

Not sports but I'll tell it anyway:

I once had to cover a regional spelling bee in a small, poor county. Two seventh graders beat all the high school contestants to make it in the final round.

Well, guess what? Both kids choke in the runoff round. They just start missing words left and right. And when they did get one right they would fuck up the word they needed to win everything.

This went on for eight or nine rounds.

Usually the first kid to misspell something goes home, do not pass go. The winner of this struggled to spell two words consecutively.

It was agonizing for the parents but I was sweating it the most, wondering how the fuck I was going to write this story without humiliating two 12 year olds...

Finally I just had to accentuate the positives without dwelling on the negatives, though I didn't omit the negatives by any means. It also helped to talk to the kid who lost to let him explain what happened - gave me a great quote about how he was so nervous he just couldn't function. Took a little extra care but it turned out OK.

 

I don't really understand how you don't mention her name, for reasons others have already stated.

If you want to keep her out of the lead, there are ways to go about it - after all, it's never one play that wins or loses a game. Did her team piss a big lead in the second half? What happened in the overtime, were they too deflated? Were there other unusual moments that would've made the game itself wacky? Halftime adjustments that bore fruit in the second half?

If you want to keep her in the lead, there's ways to go about that. Is she normally a reliable FT shooter? Did she do something spectacular before the end?

Storylines don't always happen in the final minute.

 

When a girls' basketball coach resigned earlier this year she thanked me for my coverage, especially the fact that I treated her team like I would any boys' team. The fact that we wrote honestly about them -- some headline she always brought up to me was about how they got "trounced" -- gave her girls a sense of credibility, she said.

Now, whether or not this girls' basketball team deserved credibility is debatable, but they're not babies, and this coach was glad we didn't treat them that way and sugarcoat our coverage.

 

apart from the 'name' issue, this guy is a prince, judging from the interview

smart - compassionate - good sense of humor

could see him in morgantown, huntington, charleston - any of the big papers