In newspaper jargon, for some reason, the lead sentences to reports are referred to as “ledes.” The lede ostensibly is designed to inspire readers to read the next sentence or paragraph, wanting to know more.
While I’ve already violated that writ of writin’, “never bury the lede” — never describe the car before you’ve reported that three dead bodies were found inside it — I plead insolence.
The Auburn-Houston NCAA Tournament telecast Saturday night, starring the lead trio of Jim Nantz (a Houston graduate), Bill Raftery and Grant Hill, not only buried the lede, but completely ignored it. Even before the tip, they had before them, at worst, an NCAA all-time record-equalizer.
The opposing coaches, Auburn’s Bruce Pearl and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, in wink-and-nod tribute to how hideously low big-time, big-money, big-TV-revenue college basketball has eroded, are among the most sternly sanctioned and condemned in NCAA history.
Yet there they were Saturday night, as if both had been rewarded for cheating, thus the question: Were they hired in spite of their absence of integrity or because of it? Do the spoils always go to the spoilers?
On TV, where the truth is withheld as a matter of insane conditioning — as if the NCAA otherwise will refuse to cash TV’s checks — the national broadcasters chose silence posed as ignorance.
Auburn’s personable, corned beef-on-rye, good-time guy Bruce Pearl, now in his fourth head-coaching gig, has been in the center of recruiting scandals throughout his career. At Tennessee he was on a roll with five straight 21-plus wins seasons and six straight NCAA Tournament appearances.
But then his next latest: He lied to NCAA investigators as per flagrantly illegal inducements to recruits. Tennessee was forced to fire him. For the next four seasons he essentially was blackballed-for-cause from a college head-coaching job until Auburn in 2014 found him irrevocably stained but still irresistible. Must’ve been his résumé.
Sampson’s résumé reads like a poison warning. Everywhere he has coached he left in scandal, inspiring the question, “Then why does he remain in demand?”
But it was at Indiana where he was both head coach and head of the National Association of Basketball Coaches committee on ethics, for crying out loud, that broke the record for unmitigated gall in showing ethics his go-to-hell side.
At Indiana, even worse than his previous stop at Oklahoma, Sampson, while King of Ethics, demonstrated that he was a serial violator in pursuing scores of recruits in nearly every illegal manner east of Jerry Tarkanian, primarily through impermissible phone calls.
Not only was Sampson fired, he was given the NCAA’s “death penalty,” a five-year ban from going anywhere near a college basketball program. Sampson denied the most serious charge against him: that he had lied to NCAA investigators.
But that was no deterrent to Houston, the top-ranked Division I school this season. In fact two of Sampson’s children, by regular NCAA coincidence, are employed by Houston’s athletic department. Sampson previously was known to hire recruits’ high school coaches to deliver his goods.
But Saturday night, none of the above was worth as much as a mention on TV during Houston-Auburn. The schools came away in better financial shape, no attempt to embarrass either with the truth.
That leaves one to imagine what the state of college sports would be if blind pandering weren’t the unconditional approach to addressing the nation, if the network folks made shame-shame, once in a while, rather than rah-rah.
Couldn’t be any worse, could it?
But buried ledes — in this case, dead and buried — often leave the truth to rot. And to follow network TV expectations, it’s best to use a network-issued shovel.
Reed was epitome of faded NBA class
Even years before his passing, this week, I equated Willis Reed with hard work, relentlessly pursuing better for himself and his co-workers.
To think of Reed taking off a game to lessen his “load management,” issuing opponents vulgar threats and put-downs via social media and throwing long passes to 3-point shot loiterers is beyond imagination.
And it’s to his lasting legacy that today he’d have never been selected to appear in commercials because gentlemen and sportsmen have been intentionally eliminated by sports marketing geniuses.
And imagine Reed in a black Knicks’ “streetwear” uniform. Not a chance.
So it’s Tuesday night and highly rated “Jeopardy!” is syndicated on WABC, Ch. 7, a Disney station, as is ESPN. The “question”:
“This word for a type of combat is the diminutive form of the Spanish for ‘war.’ ”
The contestant replies correctly: “What is guerilla.”
That’s right, the same word, intent and usage that caused ESPN to fire veteran tennis commentator Doug Adler as a racist, six years ago.
It remains scandalous that ESPN reacted that way and continues to allow an innocent man to be sentenced to a life of infamy. Same for the media, too frightened by racial matters to choose right over wrong, courageous protest over cowardly silence.
Dearth of ideas in their wallet
To have a year to produce the next series of NCAA Tournament Capital One ads, starring Charles Barkley, Samuel L. Jackson and blank-faced Spike Lee, only to come up with a collection of humorless, forced and uncreative comedic messages is truly a skill.
NCAA wrestling matches last seven minutes. Saturday, as seen on ESPN, an NCAA championship match was stopped for six minutes to view a replay. But this was more of what knee-jerkers demanded.
FanDuel has released a new series of ads claiming parlay bets are the secret to suckers’ success. That’s simply untrue. If it were true, FanDuel would post the payout odds: and they stink, far below what illegal books paid. Not that any of the leagues cut in on the action care, but such come-ons are a violation of the public trust..
Fox’s Joe Davis and John Smoltz spent a lot of time telling us Tuesday that the Japan-U.S. WBC final was the best baseball on earth played by the best players on earth, and on and on. They never realized that those to whom they were selling these exaggerations and endless hype were already watching.
ESPN gas pump Stephen A. Smith, who knows zilch about football, Tuesday lectured on whether QB Cam Newton is kaput. But it takes very little to get over on ESPN execs.
This week’s termination of all sports at St. Francis Brooklyn leaves basketball coach Glenn Braica stranded. Never watched a coach do more with less of everything than Braica, even considering a 6-foot-3 recruit as his center.
Slaves to fashion: As seen on ABC, the Penguins’ latest “alternate uniform” included yellow numerals, often making the Pittsburgh players impossible to identify.
Watching golf, reader Pete Covino figures he now knows that NBC stands for “Nothing But Clichés.”
