Peter King made waves in the sports media world when he walked away from Sports Illustrated for NBC last week after a storied career with the magazine. But the writer revealed Tuesday he was ready to leave of his own accord three years earlier as payment for a reporting mistake.
King was so ashamed of two errors he made while reporting on the Patriots’ Deflategate case in 2015 that he went to his managing editor at Sports Illustrated with his offer of resignation, the sportswriting icon said on Richard Deitsch’s sports media podcast. What made the situation worse for King was the fact it was the second story he’d botched in consecutive years, the first one coming during the NFL’s investigation into Ray Rice’s domestic violence incident.
“If I were a person looking at me, I would say you’ve done two things that have been really wrong, and they both have been in favor of the NFL. And I would understand that,” King said. “I got a significant fact in the Ray Rice story wrong, when he visited the league office and had his hearing. And then I got a significant fact wrong when I confirmed Chris Mortensen’s story about the footballs being more than 2 pounds under pressure.
“And in both cases, I admit it, I admitted it. In one case — the Patriots’ case — I offered my resignation to [SI editor] Chris Stone, and they said no. But I would’ve resigned. Because that is something you cannot get wrong. I got it wrong.”
At the time, King cited sources as saying “either 11 or 12” of the Patriots’ footballs during their 45-7 AFC Championship win over the Colts in 2015 were at least two pounds under the league’s prescribed pressure level. King was proven incorrect four months later, when the Wells Report, which determined it was “more probable than not” New England had purposefully altered the footballs against league rules, stated that just one of the 22 measurements taken on the 11 Patriots footballs showed two PSI under the permissible limit.
Just a year earlier, King retracted a report he wrote in July 2014 about Rice’s wife, Janay, trying to convince commissioner Roger Goodell to pardon the then-Ravens running back because the incident, in which he’s seen knocking her out in a hotel elevator, was what she called “a one-time event.” Acknowledging the mistake months later, King said his source was incorrect and Janay Rice had never expressed that sentiment to Goodell.
King said he still lives with the regret, even if Sports Illustrated didn’t consider the mistakes reason for dismissal.
“I deserve all the criticism for that that comes my way, and I don’t shy away from it,” he said. “And when I think of my career at SI, those are two things I’m ashamed of. Totally ashamed. Because that can’t happen — you can’t get facts like that wrong. Was I told something by someone I trusted that turned out to be wrong? Yes. It’s not their fault; it’s my fault. No one cares why you got something wrong. I got it wrong. If the source that I talked to was wrong, it doesn’t matter. I got it wrong.”
King, 60, brought 29 years at Sports Illustrated to an end last Thursday, when it was announced he was moving to NBC Sports in a full-time writing and TV reporting role.