NY Times "Feel Good" Jets Coverage

Being nice pays off for Karen:

Pain Is Real; Coles’s Role Is as a Decoy
By KAREN CROUSE
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J., Dec. 31 — Laveranues Coles’s face brightened when somebody mentioned the block he made to help spring running back Leon Washington on his 15-yard scoring run in the fourth quarter of the Jets’ 23-3 victory against the Oakland Raiders.

“I think that explains me totally,” Coles said. “I can go out and make all the catches in the world, but I think the most important things I do are the little things. I take more pride in blocking and watching other guys score and stuff like that than anything.”

Quarterback Chad Pennington threw to Coles twice unsuccessfully in the end zone, but on Sunday he was mostly used as a decoy, drawing double-teams to open the field for Jerricho Cotchery, who had 7 catches for 53 yards, and Justin McCareins, who caught 5 passes for 27 yards.

Coles had two catches to finish the regular season with a career-high 91, one more than he had in 2004 with the Washington Redskins. It was by design that Coles did not run many routes across the middle; the game plan was to keep him out of harm’s way as much as possible. He was playing six days after sustaining a concussion in a helmet-to-helmet hit in the second quarter of the Jets’ 13-10 victory at Miami.

Coles played the second half against the Dolphins but did not practice all week.

“He’s pretty banged up right now,” Cotchery said. “He’s a warrior. To see him take the hit he took last week when he didn’t know where he was at and come back to play today is amazing to me.”

Jets Coach Eric Mangini does not talk about injuries and has made it clear that he expects his players to follow his lead. Coles was asked repeatedly about the state of his health after the game and, per Mangini’s edict, refused to comment.

“Ask me about the playoffs,” he said.

One reporter’s persistent questioning about Coles’s head injury led to a shouting match between the two that ended with two Jets employees stepping in to restrain them.

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Coles said after cooling down.

Coles’s toughness continues to impress Mangini, who said: “He’s different than other guys who say, ‘I’m O.K. but. ...’ He says, ‘I’m O.K.’ He’s so tough he doesn’t give you anything.”

 

Crouse had a "feel good" story today on the Bears' Ricky Manning. Interesting, to say the least.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/sports/football/16manning.html?_r=2&ref=sports&oref=slogin&oref=slogin



She writes about Manning's assault case, and how he has become more accountable since the incident. Not one mention, however, of any of this:

"On April 23, 2006 Ricky Manning, Jr. attacked a man, Soroush Sabzi [1], in a Denny's restaurant after teasing him for working on a laptop computer.[2] He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly fighting a man and eventually pled no contest to felony assault. Manning faced up to four years in prison because of a previous assault charge in 2002, for which he received probation.

According to the police report, Manning and former UCLA teammates, Tyler Ebell and Maurice Jones-Drew bullied a student sitting at another table. Manning confronted the student with "Are you a faggot?", "You f---ing Jew," and then called him "an ugly f---ing Jew" and a "faggot." The student asked to be left alone and the football players beat him unconscious."


After doing a Nexis search on Manning, I'm surprised at how few stories -- mostly from AP, Tribune and Sun-Times -- mention this aspect of the case. Regardless, isn't leaving it out entirely a significant omission? And if any of the racial stuff is true, why has Ricky Manning gotten a free pass?

 

Well, it was according to the police report, yes. But from what I see, the police report was according to the victim's claim, not witnesses to the incident. Why was he offered a plea bargain? Why did the victim's lawyer allow the DA to offer a plea bargain without screaming outrage to the media? If someone had used slurs and beaten the crap out of me, I'd want justice. This makes me somewhat hesitant to publish the uncorraborated details. I'd want to know more than just what I see on Wikipedia, from which it appears your information came.

 

My thought --- inadvertently left on a different thread --- was that the story fell into the trap of letting the player, who pleaded guilty to a crime, explain it away as an error in judgment that stemmed from hanging out with the wrong crowd. As though he got caught with some reefer at a party. It all comes off as naive. I'd like to think an editor at a good paper would have gotten in front of this one.

 

I don't really want to be lumped into bash-Krouse crowd -- I don't have a problem with a lot of what she has taken heat for on this thread -- but I read the Manning story out of curiosity and am verrrrry uncomfortable with it. Frankly, I'm surprised a story like this would run in any newspaper, much less the New York Times.

One of the frustrating aspects of being a reporter is the feeling that we don't really know the subject about whom we are writing. And this is only exacerbated in situations where 1-on-1 access is virtually nil, like the week leading up to the NFC Championship game. But we can't simply ignore that fact and attempt to write as if we know the subject anyway. If Crouse had spent enough time with Manning and his family, and his new wife, and his teammates, and people who know him the best, and really, truly, honestly came to the conclusion that Ricky Manning had turned his life around, then I have no problem with her writing that. But if that is the case, I need some more proof besides Ricky Manning saying that is the case. This is a one source story (unless you count the lame Lovie Smith quote) in which Manning is the only person saying he has turned his life around.

I liked the anecdote at the end. I liked some of the writing touches (although I thought the observation about Manning being quoted while shoving toiletries into a Louis Vouton bag was a tad much. . .in a post-game NFL locker room, 54 percent of all quotes are said while players are shoving things into Louis Vouton bags and trying to get the hell out of Dodge). But it wouldn't have been very hard to turn this story from a "Hey, Ricky Manning has turned his life around" story to a, "Hey, has Ricky Manning really turned his life around?" story.

 

a mistake many reporters -- not just karen -- make with this kind of attempt to humanize a player is they're naive enough to believe one conversation is enough to gain a genuine insight into the person. it's just soooo dangerous when doing a piece on a player with past issues, such as manning.

if the police report isn't solid enough to use, then i'd sure as heck also not do a one-voice story on manning, either. at least in the case of coles, karen covers the jets and obviously has developed a long-term rapport with him, creating a tremendous trust level.

i'd bet that if the bears get to the super bowl, karen will be sweating bullets over what could come out about the manning case. all the investigative hounds will be going after that story for 2 weeks, not just trying to nail the "real" story off a hurried post-game interview with one very suspect source.

p.s. -- gotta love how karen sympathetically writes that manning, a "gun enthusiast," doesn't go to shooting ranges any more. poor fella.

 

Excellent point. I feel the same way. If it's a player on the team I cover, I feel confident that after a certain amount of time I at least know something about what makes him tick. If I'm doing a 'hit-and-run' feature on someone at the Final Four, that would be a different story.

 

Surprised that we have not seen some redemption type stories from Karen on the Saints. They are a virtual Lifetime network.