Your Best "WTF -Did They Just Do That?" Experience.

In the past seven days, I have been told that I did not tweet enough in my coverage of a spring football game, a midday baseball game and the first game of a softball doubleheader.

Yeah, I know. And while my initial response may have been over the top -- "what would have happened if Dr. King just tweeted about his dream" -- I also thought that this was a wonderful opportunity for all of us on sj to share both good and bad "Wtf moments"

I'll start with the bad
1) Having a parent ask me why I'm not writing enough negative stuff about a freshman who's starting over a senior
2) After having a player die in an indoor football game, the owner bitching me out the next day because he didn't speak first at a ten-minute press briefing.
3) Having a local newspaper obtain video of that fatal play and running it before I released it...with commercials ... because "it wasn't as bad as Joe Theisman's hit"
4) Covering Sean Taylor's funeral and noticing 5 or 10 people thought it was ok to wear a Redskins jersey to a *&^#$# funeral.
5) At same funeral, being in the same restroom as OJ
6) As a golf SID, having the coach ask me why the lead golfer's average is listed as 72.0 instead of 71.78 and agast that I can't change numeric law when it comes to rounding up. [He bought lunch later, so we're good."
Good stuff on the next post

 

Now the good stuff

1) Talking with Doug Flutie and saying the advantage he had as a backup QB was he could make the most of his reps in training camp ... and having a Heisman Trophy winner agree with your Xs and Os
2) Eating at Randy White's Bar-B-Q in Texas and having that former Dallas Cowboys defensive star ask you how good the bar-b-q.
3) Having Lynn Hoppes mess up the assignment schedule and call you at 5:30 wondering if you can help with Florida State coverage that night. Best five seconds of silence in my career.
4) Bill France remembering your piece from a Daytona 500 five years ago and going "Nice write, son"
5) And finally and most importantly, reading my daughter's first published piece and smiling while going "Damn, this is good."

 

No. 4 .. "Big" Bill France?

 

You're fucking kidding, right?

 

It's not like what you wrote, but here's what came to me when I saw the thread title.

There's a girl that I've worked with at a couple of different stops. And at the time this story takes place, we hadn't worked together yet, but I knew who she was because she'd worked for my then-new boss at a previous paper. (I'm a guy, by the way.) We wound up covering the same game for different outlets, and I talked to her for a few minutes. Both of us were engaged to our spouses at the time and are still married to them.

After the game, we go to interview the winning coach. Neither of us had met him before. After we introduce ourselves to him, he says something to the effect of "Wouldn't it be funny if the two of you wound up getting together and marrying each other?" I don't think my jaw has ever dropped so fast.

I would kid her about it later on when we worked together.

 

Big Circus: I was waiting for, "We invited him to the wedding."

 

freqposter would have had her shirt off by deadline.

 

so Big Circus is definitely not freqposter....

 

LOL, no. Don't have anything close to that kind of attention to detail.

 

Apologies in advance for the longish setup.
At my last shop (p.m. daily) I was in sports. One night I'm finishing up two softball stories, layout, etc. as a tornado passes through the area. Around midnight the power started flickering so I turned up the scanner full blast (I was the only one in the office) and headed to the basement.
After things settled down, I finished up the sports pages and headed home, probably about 1:30 a.m. or so. When I got home, my wife was still up and could see what I was thinking. Yep, I grabbed my camera and notebook. She joined me as we went looking for tornado damage. I got pics of some downed trees, including one blocking a road. A cop there told me a trailer park outside of town got bigger damage. So about 3 a.m. in the pouring rain I get pics of overturned trailers. I get back, take a nap, take a shower and head to the office.
Mind you, I was in sports so I shouldn't have had to do this at all. But I did because when I called my editor it was clear (also based on his strong history of laziness) he wouldn't be getting any pics. I also knew if we waited for someone on the news side to get photos, our lazy ass reporter/"photographer" MIGHT have gone out to get something in town after things were cleaned up, i.e. "Second Street was looking clean Wednesday morning, with little evidence left of a tree that fell across the road during Tuesday night's tornado."
So the first words from my editor upon seeing my pics: "These look a little dark." I calmly (after biting my tongue extremely hard) reminded him this was at 3 a.m. in the pouring rain. He still wasn't terribly happy and said he'd see what he could do in photoshop (which I would have done if I could have kept my eyes open enough). BTW, pics looked fine on the front page, not that my boss ever thanked me.

 

The Denver-at-Kansas City Thanksgiving night game (The first year the NFL started having three games that night): Watching Jason Whitlock pick through the leftover turkey in the buffet. With his bare hands.

The other one I can recall that stands out is one that taught me something about what's been known as "helicopter parents" lately. I wrote in a game that the girls' basketball team was able to play well and win despite the absence of the starting point guard. The helicopter parents interpreted that to mean "The team was so much more awesome because the starting point guard missed the game."

I showed the article to about a dozen people asking them what they interpreted. None of them came even close to what point guard parents came up with.

I didn't cost her a scholarship, though, so I guess I didn't try hard enough.