Update on lack of A&T football coverage
Update:
Now I have been informed that I must disclose the nature of my questions and the topic of my story to A&T officials before being granted the opportunity to talk to any football player or coach. The News & Record, following standards common to journalism, will not abide by this policy. Why not? Because it's very common in journalism for a reporter to begin an interview presuming to write about one topic and then discover -- as a result of the answers received -- something new and previously unknown that becomes more compelling.
Here's an example.
Many years ago, while I worked at another paper in another state, another reporter and I were doing what we presumed would be a garden-variety feature on a basketball player named Tora. We were proceeding with questions about why she was such a good player. Boilerplate stuff.
Then, almost on a whim, the other reporter asked Tora how she got her name. She proceeded to describe how she was born more than 10 weeks prematurely and that the nurse who helped in her delivery was named Tora.
Needless to say, dribble penetration, 3-point field goals and intense defense became irrelevant at this stage. Like any decent reporters -- and curious readers -- we wanted to know more about her medical travails.
What resulted was a story that essentially said this kid was a medical miracle. Children born that early in the late 1970s didn't always make it to their first birthday. And if they did, they were almost certainly doomed to growth issues, asthma, developmental problems and a host of ills that would continue to manifest themselves over time.
But here she was -- apparently free of asthma after initially suffering it -- and on her way to All-ACC acclaim in basketball.
And we didn't have a clue about it until what seemed like the end of a 15-minute interview.
Therefore, if we had been subject to the guidelines A&T seeks to impose on the News & Record now, we could have been accused of lying. We declared original intentions and then wrote about something else. But we weren't liars; we were journalists who discovered stuff in the normal course of an interview.
Anybody who has been in this line of work for three months will tell you this is not extraordinary.
Here's another example:
Almost a year ago today, I went over to A&T to talk to Brandon Greeson, a football player from High Point who was highly recruited and who signed with Nebrasksa. He left Nebraska and came to A&T. We had a nice chat. I ultimately wrote a story about Greeson.
But that wasn't the story I got immediately as a result of my attendance at practice that day.
So Brandon and I are talking and he says to me, "Know why we're gonna be good this year? That guy." He pointed at a person who was running around the track.
The person made his way to our direction and I saw he was wearing Universiity of Michigan athletics attire. Brandon informed me that this person was a transfer from U of M.
And his name was Larry Harrison.
Completely unknown to me -- and A&T officials -- at this time was the background of Harrison. And so I went over to the campus to write about Brandon Greeson, which I did. But I came back with something else.
The rest of the story doesn't need to be rehashed at this point.
--RBD