Why I drink ... phone calls.

Mine was similar to Calvin's.

The radio play-by-play guy for the local high school was also a veteran amateur baseball umpire. And he swore like a sailor every moment the mic wasn't hot. He was quite full of himself, having been in that town since before the schools were integrated. But he had good stories and was palatable in small doses.

One morning, I get a call from his wife. He's in the hospital and would I mind interviewing him for a column? It's terminal cancer and he's not expected to survive much longer.

So I drive over that afternoon and spend an hour shooting the bull with him in his room, chatting about how he got started in radio, funny stories about umpiring games. I chat some with his wife and his kids. Pretty good column, I think. Not award-winning, but touching.

I don't remember specifically what I wrote, but it was something along the lines of "Frank Fullofhimself is surrounded by family and friends as his fight with terminal cancer nears an end."

Next morning, I pick up the phone and it's Frank's wife, absolutely livid.

"I can't believe you'd do such a thing! How can I show him that article?"

"Why?"

"Because he doesn't know he's dying!"

I was incredulous. Nobody had told him the diagnosis. Apparently the doctors were sworn not to let the "secret" slip out. But nobody mentioned that to me.

She ripped me a new one for over 30 minutes, and I just apologized to her and told her that I told the story as best I could.

He died within a week. And I wasn't invited to the service, nor did I wish to go.

However, other folks in town were very appreciative of the piece.

You just never know sometimes.

 

The wife should have made it clear to you beforehand that it was a secret that the guy doesn't know. What if you would have asked him a question about what he thought about dying?

Either that, or she could have asked you to hold the column until after he died.

 

Yesterday, an idiot, who one of my writers swore was probably the local bookie, calls me asking for NBA scores from Monday night. Not one. Not two. All of them.
Conversation goes like this:
Alleged bookie: I need the NBA scores
Bamadog: Which ones.
AB: All of 'em.
BD: Do you get free bread, eggs and milk from the grocery store?
AB: Huh?
BD: No, you don't. Their product is food. They don't give it away or else they'd go out of business. My product is information. I can't give it away or else I'll go out of business. Buy a paper. It's only 50 cents and it has all of the scores in it.
AB: You don't have the NBA scores in there all of the time.
BD: Not true. Every day, we have a NBA glance. Nearly every day, we have an NBA roundup. The information is there. You just have to pay for it.
Caller hangs up.
When you give away your product for free, you devalue it in the eyes of your consumers to nothing.

 

When I worked in NASCAR country, I'd get calls every qualifying day. "Who won the pole? Who won the pole?"

One day, one particularly ungrateful regular caller asked. Indy 500 qualifying happened to be around the same time. So I answered: "Arie Luyendyk."

I hope he spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out which car Luyendyk drove.

 

*****
What I found out, he is looking for his STEPson's (operative word there step) scoring.
*****

Dude, that's patently offensive.

Agreed that guy is a bozo, but the stepfather may the the kid's only father.

That's just insensitive.

 

Well, at least today's round of phone calls was well deserved. I mistyped a box score from a faxed scoresheet and had every kid with the wrong total, which of course made the roundup story wrong as well. Thankfully, only two left phone numbers for me to call back and apologize directly.

 

I think it's horrible they kept the guy's condition from him.

 

I agree.

 

While you're never supposed to "assume" I don't think you did anything wrong. The wife was clueless.

I had similar -- but obviously less serious -- incident.
I was doing a feature on a local guy who had become a fairly prominent baseball player agent. Interview is going well, friendly, good stories.
I asked him who his first client was. He starts a lengthy story on this player who was a veteran major-leaguer with average ability, he was then on the Mets. They were college teammates, my guy goes into coaching then eventually the agent biz. Player is a mid-rounds draft choice. Player asks fledgling agent friend for some advice and it all proceeds from there.
After the story runs, the agent calls me and is pissed because the player is threatening to sue since, he said, they never had an official player-agent relationship.
I was kinda floored by this. (It was actually the second time I had been threatened with a lawsuit, but those are never easy to swallow). I said, do you want me to come to your office and play back the tape? The part where I ask you who your first client was and you spent the next 10 minutes telling me about Player? What was I supposed to think when you did that?
He said to sit tight, he was going to call back the Player and try to talk him down. I waited a couple of weeks and heard nothing. I called the agent to ask what's up and he said he smoothed it over.

 

It's a NASCAR fan. It took THREE hours.

 

I swear there was a Cubs game years ago where a player homered and the announcer let the audience know the homer was hit for a dying child ... and that's how the kid found out he was on the way out.

I also recall many moons ago, when I was a news desker, the city editor letting us know there was a story that day about a child with a terminal disease, but the story did not say that at the request of the parents and the doctors. We complied ... and also ran the obit a few weeks later.

 

I used to get this guy who would phone in every game night asking for the score of a hockey game featuring a certain WHL team -- apparently he had access to a schedule and nothing else. The thing is said team is from about five hours away from our paper. I made the mistake of putting up with this the first couple of times. I very quickly tried to nip this in the bud, however. He phones up one night asking for the score, I told him I am in the middle of laying out the section, but it should be online for him to check, and I didn't have time -- which I legitimately didn't, had a stack of pages to get through. He responds "well I don't have access to the Internet" so I told him the final would be in the paper tomorrow for him to read. He responds "Well I don't get the paper." At this point I'm annoyed, but I keep my cool. And just flat out tell him I don't have time to drop everything I'm doing to check for the score. If he wants it he'll have to buy a paper tomorrow. At that point he starts swearing at me and that I really have no patience for and just hang up the phone. The calls stop for a while. He then starts probing, trying every few weeks or so on the news lines. He was very recognizable. He was a heavy breather and the tone was quite unforgettable. Turns out one of our reporters that used to work in the city where this team was from answered the news line once when he phoned looking for the score and apparently she recognized him from her days there always phoning looking for the score in the hockey game. Turns out it appears the sports guys there chased him off and he started phoning me.

He also phoned once asking me why the temperature given on a website for a town nearby was one degree different than the temperature given on I think the weather channel. I told him I had no idea. He of course got angry over that. Then he demanded I tell him the real temperature and when I tried to explain to him there is no possible way I could tell him the correct temperature he starts swearing at me again. Very quick hang up on my end. All over one degree Celsius.

I also was accused once -- not to my face -- of being bribed by a figure skating mom because I ran a picture each of a brother and sister that were not her kids but the club's media coordinator's kids from the big local figure skating competition. I also ran another couple pictures of other kids -- we did a photo page for the event. This was back at my first stop shortly before digital took over. So I was shooting with film in a poorly lit arena hoping something would turn out that was usable -- and being figure skating they freaked if you used flash photography. I basically used the photos that turned out. I found out about the accusations from the media coordinator who quit after being accused of bribing me and the following fight. So that was fun.