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My, hasn't sportswriting field taken on a new look?
Remember hand-set type, typewriters?
On the day that the UK Athletics Department held a surprise retirement luncheon in my honor in the Commonwealth Stadium press box. Cliff Hagan, my former boss who unfortunately was a casualty of the Emerygate
Russell Rice
Cats' Pause Columnist
mess, called to give his best regards and wish me luck in future endeavors.
"I know it must be traumatic," he said, "leaving the university after all these years." On the contrary, the trauma is not leaving UK. but in returning to my first love, which is newspapering. and wondering if I can pick up the pieces and adjust to the changes that have taken place in the profession since I wrote my last column for The Lexington Leader 22 years ago.
Beginning with one and one-half years each at The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg and The Hazard Herald and continuing through 13 years with The Lexington Leader, the tools of our trade were an old standard typewriter, copy paper, copy pencil and scissors. There was a period at the beginning when we built our own headlines with hand-set type, operated a linotype machine and personally put the cold type in the chase.
Contrast that with today, where word processors, computers, offset printing and Fax machines are just a few of the sophisticated realities that make life so much easier for the newspaper people and are so commonplace that it's hard to realize we really did survive without them.
The same holds true for the television crews, which now have lightweight camcorders and the capabilities of getting a "live" crew to a location in the time it used to take to ready big bulky equipment for transportation, and for the radiomen whose voices are transmitted over the finest of sound equipment.
While the tools of the trade have changed, so has the manner of reporting sports stories. During my five years as a sports editor, the head man at The Herald-Leader was the late Fred B. Wachs, who was a close personal friend of Wildcat basketball coach Adolph Rupp.
They were so close, in fact, that Rupp wouldn't hestitate to pick up the telephone and call Wachs when someone at the paper wrote something negative about the Wildcats. Under that kind of restraint, there was no way the newspaper was going to pick up a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
That also was an era before the Open Records Law and the constant flow of "leaks" in the manner of "Deep Throat" of Watergate fame.
"Where's the leak?" coach Rupp used to ask, "Where's the leak?"
Joe Hall, then an assistant coach, and I used to have a good laugh by springing that question on each other at most inopportune times.
Once when only Rupp and I knew something and it somehow got into the local paper, he asked, "Where's the leak?"
"You are, coach," I replied.
Sportswriters then, as now, enjoyed a sort of second-class celebrity status in the basketball pecking order and they were careful not to rock the boat by deviating from the established norm, which was to write only good things about the Wildcats.
Football also enjoyed its fine moments under Paul "Bear" Bryant, but that sport never reached the sacred cow status accorded UK basketball by the media. Bryant complained in his book that during his tenure as UK
Rice, right, interviews Army coach Paul Dietzel at Bluegrass Field in the early 60's
football coach, he once hired Earl Ruby, sports editor of The Courier-Journal, as a media consultant and that newspaper still blasted him.
Then along came television and Watergate, and suddenly the entire style of sportswriting changed. Everybody seemed to be investigating everything, reporting in depth as the competition increased for the eyes and ears of the sports fans.
Washed-up, loud-mouthed, opinionated former coaches and even lawyer types suddenly were filling the videowaves with their "expert" opinions, while college players still wet behind the ears were espounding "great truths" about how the game was played, should have been played or would be played.
I remember Rupp telling his players, "You can talk to those reporters all you want to about your family, your girl friends, your pets, your hobbies, your schoolwork and all that good stuff, but don't discuss strategy and other things about the game. That's my job. I'm the coach. You don't qualify as an expert on such stuff."
After Bob Tallent talked back to Rupp in a colorful manner during the Tennessee game at Knoxville on Saturday and found his locker empty when he reported for practice on Monday, Rupp was so incensed by the manner in which the media handled the affair that he put a lid on his players.
That was just three months before I joined the UK sports information office. When I arrived, one of the first things Rupp did was to have all interviews cleared through me. I also was to stand within hearing distance at all interviews. I solved that problem by standing just out of hearing distance, explaining that my hearing was excellent. I just didn't want the interviewer to feel like he was being censored or intimidated.
When Hall succeeded Rupp, he had many disciplines, including the matter of interviews. At one stage in his career, he had a dentist friend on the UK College of
Medicine staff annually instruct the players on how to react during interviews with the media. The procedure included actual interviews that were videotaped, played back and critiqued.
After Jerry Claiborne succeeded Fran Curci as head football coach, we used to appear before the team at the first squad meeting in the fall and discuss media and press relations, including how to handle interviews.
One of our basic messages was to cut out the "You knows." We used to count the times a player would say those two words during an interview and later call him aside and tell him that instead of "You knowing," he should pause and take his time because the interviewer wasn't in any hurry. The same held true for answering questions that were a little out of line.
When hit by a tough question, we would tell the players again to take their time before answering and if in doubt, don't answer.
The UK policy in all sports now is that a person wishing to interview a player should call the proper person in the SID office and set up the interview. For telephone interviews, the office takes the person's number and has the player call that person collect.
We're now curious about the interview policies of Rick Pitino, the new UK basketball coach, and offer him a word of advice, which he probably doesn't want or need: "Be fair. Don't play favorites."
One last thought: when we started writing this column two years ago, we told Oscar we would do it for fun, and it has been a fun thing. We concentrated on writing about the older players and teams because our position at the university would have given us an unfair advantage if we wrote about current players.
Such self-imposed restrictions now are lifted, but we won't neglect our research and constant contact with the "old-timers." Like newspapering, that also is a labor of love in this corner.