LET’S get one thing out of the way at the top, OK?
There’s never been a sportswriter born who didn’t want to trade places with the people they cover, at least once. Are you kidding? We reside on the periphery of some wonderful things. We see hitters launch batting-practice fastballs into orbit from just outside the batting cage. We see basketball players vault themselves into the rafters from just off the floor. Droplets of boxers’ blood and sweat splash on our computer screens just outside the ring.
You can’t be that close to all of that and not want to swap outfits, just once. It’s what drew us to these gigs in the first place. It’s what keeps us in the game. It’s like that wonderful line Robert Duvall had in “The Paper,” when he’s explaining to Glenn Close’s character the odd, relentless proximity between schlubby journalists and the glamorous folks we cover.
“We get to live in their world,” he says. “But it’s their world.”
Coaches are the ones we really envy, truth be told, because most of them look like us: older, graying, balding, wearing jackets and ties to gymnasiums and stadiums instead of gym shorts and sneakers. They’re the ones for whom we reserve the greatest scrutiny.
Every now and then, there’ll come a news story across a news wire detailing how some soccer club from Luxembourg or wherever has decided to name a new coach, and they decided to give the job to the columnist from the Luxembourg Post, and that always warms the cockles of our hearts.
Because we could do a better job than they can.
Just ask us.
Just read us.
Until recently, nobody’s ever decided to go the other way on this one-way street. The people we cover always look at our jobs as a curious creation, part stalker, part groupie, part pot-stirrer, part troublemaker. Mostly, they look at us as ne’er-do-wells who are always looking hard for a story, and always looking harder for the pre-game buffet.
Not so long ago, there was a coach who asked me a very simple, very straightforward question.
“You have the best job in the world,” the coach said, and he was terribly earnest, and there wasn’t a drop of insincerity or sarcasm in his voice. “What kind of pressure do you face? You bring your notebook and your tape recorder around, you ask a couple of questions, you watch a ballgame, and you go home. What’s better than that?”
I pondered the question for a minute, and then I told Jeff Van Gundy the truth: “It’s harder than it looks.”
Jeff Van Gundy found that out the hard way this week, which was his difficult reward for deciding to play the part of intrepid reporter, and also small slice of justice for all coaches, like Van Gundy, who spend so much time railing at reporters who use unnamed sources in order to break stories and keep their readers informed.
This is all perfectly legal and perfectly ethical on this side of the journalistic tableau, you see. If a guy asks to keep his name out of the paper, it’s for a good reason, usually because they’d be fired – or worse – if their name were attached to whatever inflammatory tidbit happened to find its way into the paper that day. You only offer this courtesy to unimpeachably reliable sources. It’s something we take pretty seriously. Some reporters go to jail rather than give up their contacts.
Van Gundy’s going to find out about that pretty soon, after flippantly going public with a referee that, he claimed, he “knows forever,” who wasn’t working the playoffs, and who tipped Van Gundy off that playoff refs would allegedly be cracking down on Yao Ming in the postseason.
Now, if Van Gundy worked for a newspaper, he could seek the cloak of the First Amendment here, assuming he’s telling the truth. But in Van Gundy’s world, David Stern keeps the First Amendment folded up in his wallet, retrieving it only when the commissioner wishes to mount his bully pulpit. Loose-lipped, loose-cannon coaches receive no such courtesies.
So Van Gundy has a choice here. He can give up his source, in which case it might be 2017 before the Rockets ever get another call from any NBA referee. He can say he made the whole thing up, which would be the kind of cowardly maneuver he would never tolerate from his players. Or he can go to the wall, protect his source, and face the wrath of Stern, who’s already said he wouldn’t be above booting Van Gundy out of the league for this breach of protocol.
There are other troubling issues here, of course. If this referee enjoyed the kind of relationship with Van Gundy where he felt comfortable enough to share this conspiracy theory, you wonder if that coziness has ever benefited the Rockets in an inappropriate way when that referee happened to be working the final minutes of a close game in Houston. In newspapers, that’s called a “conflict of interest,” and offenders expect to face the harshest kinds of consequences.
In basketball, it should be called the same thing. And Van Gundy should be dealt with accordingly – as soon as Stern is done making him sweat out his original offense.
It really is harder than it looks, isn’t it, Jeff?
(Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is WriteBackVac@aol.com. His Yankees-Red Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” is available at bookstores everywhere.)
VAC’SWHACKS
That’s a really cute mullet that John Rocker’s sporting now. Makes you wonder what he might have thought if he saw a haircut like that on the 7 train back in the day.
Jay Williams ruins his NBA career on a motorcycle. Aaron Boone wrecks what could have been a splendid stretch with Yankees playing offseason basketball. And still Kellen Winslow Jr. decides to hop on that bike. You think maybe the next reckless kid might remember Winslow?
How do you suppose Yankees like the idea of their $200 million ballclub spending the summer as a spoiler? And how many times do you think the name “Horace Clarke” has been uttered in New York City the past 10 days?
People who spend this much time analyzing and re-analyzing the quality of the questions Kim Jones asks on YES Network pre- and post-game shows really do need to get out of the house a little more.