Of everything you've written, what prompted the angriest responses?

I once wrote a long piece on how/why a local minor league franchise had gone in the dumper. At the next home game, a group of fans chanted my name followed by the word ``SUCKS'' over and over for about five minutes.

How do you put that on a resume?

 

Obviously you put, "As the Bumblefuck fans proudly proclaim, Big Green Wahoo sucks!"

 

This just jogged my memory.

Had a woman call me up. Found out after the call that she was dying of cancer from one of the news siders.

Anyway, she asked if I could do a story on her husband, who was retiring as a local assistant coach and, back in the 80s, he spent some time as the head coach of a prominent local team and no one had ever written about him. She had talked to several people at the paper, they all passed and talked to other papers. Well, I write the story.

She calls me again the next summer, says her neighbor's kid is off at college and doing work for the D-I football team on the side. I found a cool angle for it, so I went with it.

She calls me up two months later, angry because her local high school volleyball team's score didn't get in from the night before. I tried explaining that coaches don't always call in the score and we had staffed a fair amount of their games and this one was non-league, both teams didn't have outstanding records, yada yada. She then gives me hell for a good 10 minutes, telling me how terrible my paper is, how I never write anything good and if "I'm not going to have the god damn volleyball score, why in the hell should she buy the god damn paper."

I go into shock. All I can say is sorry. I don't want to argue with her, don't want to upset her. But she just totally blows up and then finally gets off the phone.

About a month later we get her obit in.

Maybe it's me, but if I'm dying of cancer, the last thing I'm thinking about is what's in the local paper. God bless the woman, but man, that was easily the most awkward I've ever felt.