Lee Jenkins on O.J. Mayo's "recruiting"

Having the name wrong is a huge mistake.
The mileage difference is nitpicking. I know it can be considered a cliche, but it's generally considered to be 3,000 miles coast to coast. Jenkins was just generalizing that, not a major gaffe. Him having worked on both coasts, he knows about mileage.

 

Go figure - I had the same concerns as Hoops. Good, not great, minds think alike, no?

Seriously, Guillory is bad news. That isn't exactly a secret. I wonder if this is indeed just the first step or installment of what promises to be a classic NYT probe...

If so, if I was Floyd, I wouldn't have shared that story. Without it, Jenkins had little else.

 

Sorry if I made it seem as if we were disagreeing at all, BuckW. I completely agree that the questions left unasked are the more damning in this case - especially to our expert readership here at SportsJournalists.com. But as an exercise in journalistic forensics, it's an interesting example of how a chain of simple factual errors can lead a casual reader (me) to question the central premise of a complex piece about which the reader knows only little.

I'm no basketball maven, nor have I been following this story, so I encounter this piece in much the same way any average reader would. And while I understand that errors are human, and deadline sloppiness sometimes unavoidable, when I find two boneheaded mistakes of that nature in the same short piece, I'm going to question the authority of every fact in the rest of the story.

 

This story never would have made it past our desk, and our desk is not even close to the NYT's.

It just has so many holes in it. How would any editor find this thing ready to go?

I mean, you've got to at least have someone corroborate the story. Someone, anyone. Otherwise it's Floyd telling the biggest tall tale in college history.

 

I'll cut Floyd a little more slack -- if he's embellishing the story, he's putting his reputation at stake -- but why didn't this story have anything in it from Mayo? Go to West Virginia, call him on his cellphone, hire a stringer to find him, but this story has to have Mayo talking in it. It doesn't appear as if Jenkins even made the effort. That's the biggest hole in this story.

 

Hardly would change the power structure. We're talking about an exception, not a rule.
I think you're prone to an overstatement or two. And, I'm also guessing you're very young.

This isn't the first time a player has gone to L.A., Chicago or New York to increase earning potential off the court or field.

 

Man, y'all, see the forest from the trees here. The NYT story has a coach basically admitting that a prized recruit was grounds for debasing oneself. I don't think you really sit on that just to get a Mayo reaction, not with the team in the NCAA tournament. Why would Floyd or Jenkins fabricate that? The likely explanation for the Ronald/Rodney thing has been explained by MileHigh. And the greater truth of the story far exceeds a nitpick about the distance between Huntington and L.A. Would the explosiveness of what Floyd is reported as saying been any less if the story said Mayo was from Huntington Beach?

 

Is this contagious? History? Really?

 

dooley - fact is, you google "rodney guillory" and the first thing that pops up is a mention of how he once funnelled cash to an NCAA basketball player.

even a cursory look into this guy's background would have revealed certain facts about this guy that probably should have been included in the story. instead, it's written as a one-source story with nary a skeptical eye paid to the fact that mayo landing at USC might not have been a mere case of floyd's "good luck."

 

I for one would've liked to see some background on Guillory, but I read into it as this guy seems shady. Maybe the average non-sports fan wouldn't get the inference, but I know I did, as did others.

 

Plus Guillory's got a past history of shady dealings specifically with USC basketball players, including getting a USC player, Jeff Trepagnier, suspended just a few years ago for illegally buying him plane tx while representing a sports agent. The USC athletic department obviously knew this guy very well and should've been trying to keep him away from its hoops program. That's what makes Floyd's claim that he was just an unknown "stranger" who appeared in his office one day and offered Mayo so absurdly dubious. That Jenkins piece presents Floyd's version hook/line/sinker without bothering to even mention Guillory's history, much less ask the obvious questions it raises, is pretty shoddy.