Kentucky fans upset with Jerry Tipton

The comments after this would be comical if they weren't so frustrating - the short of it is that Kentucky fans believe Tipton should be bleeding blue and white, not asking real questions of recruits' parents about Gillespie's tough practices:

http://herald-leader.typepad.com/behind_the_headlines/2008/05/attacks-on-repo.html

 

It appears on of the posters making a comment is a certain "********!"

Hey, I can't even say his name!

 

Are some people still under the impression that fans want journalists covering their teams?

 

Only if they bring a "positive attitude."

 

He's been popping up on more comment boards lately. It must be a cycle, like the cicadas

 

Boy, for all those commenters who "don't read that paper because it's not positive" sure know a hell of a lot about the story he wrote.

 

I've read some funny things in my life on teh interweb. But I'm not sure anything will ever approach ...

written by a guy who created his own forum and has 4,000 of the 4,117 posts there.

 

Ah, Kentuckians.

 

Fans... :

However, I do agree on one point.

The paper should post the audio of the interviews.

We post audio/video links of everything these days.

And we would demand full disclosure from others, particularly public figures, in similar situations.

Post the audio and let the masses make up their minds.

 

As someone who tries to keep up with the general goings-on at Kentucky, I think this all started with a guy named Marc Maggard, who is a blogger/recruiting guy or whatever. And apparently (paraphrasing here), Maggard wrote that parents of these recruits had told him that Tipton was asking about whether they had considered Gillispie's off-court behavior (i.e, rumors of drinking, womanizing, etc.). Obviously, the Herald-Leader is denying that after reviewing tapes of the interviews or notes or whatever. But if that is true, I do think it would be questionable at best to go down that road with a recruit or his parents. It certainly can give the impression you are "recruiting against" the school you cover, which would be just as bad as recruiting for the school you cover.

I like Jerry, and he's fabulous at many aspects of beat writing, but he does do some stuff that I've wondered about. I remember earlier this year, he wrote several days worth of long, very detailed stories about how Gillispie kicked off a end-of-the-bench walk on who had won a spot on the team during an open tryout. It seemed to me like overkill, and the way he wrote the stories definitely made it seem as though he was trying to paint Gillispie as a really bad guy.

 

Would you want your paper releasing uncut your phone interviews with sources? When you spoke to them, do you think sources will cooperate in the future if they think every word they utter will go online?

What if you were off the record part of the time? Do you put that on the web, too? And if you lop that off, what's the point of posting it in the first place?

 

I have a question. Isn't Western Kentucky a better basketball school?