Pro football coaches get fired all the time. This season, employment is as precarious for football reporters.
A tale of newsroom sacks in two cities begins in Cleveland, where Tony Grossi has been bounced off the Browns beat at the Plain Dealer. It continues in Green Bay, where the Press-Gazette has yanked a column from Bob McGinn, its Packers writer.
Both actions came amid heat from team honchos and may leave an impression of weak-kneed editors. Neither paper has told readers about the changes, which is par for the course in an industry whose editorial pages expound on the need of full-disclosure by others.
Football reporting presents obstacles. Managements restrict access to officials and players; players, caught in a paramilitary atmosphere, are anxious about speaking freely and antagonizing the head coach, who has huge sway over their careers.
Since players are on the scene fleetingly-the average career is less than three years-reporters tend to build strong, cozy relations with management. Some, like Boston Globe and NBC Sports commentator Will McDonough, can appear as shills for bosses, and even mild criticism can infuriate thin-skinned owners and coaches.
At the Plain Dealer (circulation 428,000), Grossi covered the Browns since 1984 but lost favor with owner Art Modell. His stories of 1990 contract disputes with five players, in which he gave ample space to players` claims, may have further rankled the club. The hierarchy (though not its spokesman)
stopped taking his calls and might have lagged a few nice stories to competitors.
In October, Grossi pinned down a good tale: Modell, his team sinking, talked with assistant coach Jim Shofner about replacing head coach Bud Carson, perhaps around Nov. 11, when the team had a mid-season week off.
The sports editor was on vacation, so Grossi dealt with deputy sports editor Sam Pollack, disclosing his two sources. Pollack told him to go ahead and write the story from Denver, where the Browns were for a Monday night game.
Pollack and Managing Editor Gary Clark oversaw editing of the story, which the paper decided to put on Page 1 of its Oct. 9 edition. In two key moves, Pollack reminded Grossi to try to get comment from Modell or Executive Vice President Ernie Accorsi, and, before hearing back, stuck this sentence in the story: ”Efforts to reach Modell and Accorsi yesterday were unsuccessful.”
Grossi never tried to contact Modell or Accorsi, a clear breach of fairness. Pollack never checked. The sentence, ”Efforts to reach Modell and Accorsi yesterday were unsuccessful,” remained.
Modell went bonkers. He issued a denial both of his having been unreachable and of the story, which Grossi stood by. Twenty-eight days later, Carson was fired by Modell, and replaced by Shofner, during the open week.
Executive Editor Thomas Greer, a former Sun-Times sports writer, suspended Grossi for three days for insubordination (not heeding the request to call the principals) and took him off the Browns beat. Pollack was admonished but his status not changed.
The Newspaper Guild, the union representing editorial employees at the Plain Dealer, is taking the action to arbitration, arguing that the punishment doesn`t fit the crime. About 60 staff members staged an informational picket in front of the paper, many believing the paper caved in to Modell.
Plain Dealer sports columnist Bill Livingston says: ”Grossi is a fine reporter who made a slip. The punishment is out of proportion with the crime.” Managing Editor Clark said he couldn`t comment, while efforts to reach Greer were unsuccessful (we really did try).
In Packers-crazed Green Bay, McGinn has covered the team for the Press-Gazette (circulation 59,000) since 1984 and written a weekly, in-season column since 1987. He`s meticulous, studying films and writing detailed analyses of strategy and individual player performances.
On Nov. 1, he wrote an intriguing column based on interviews with four unidentified NFL scouts and assistant coaches who had studied Packers performance, as well as with unidentified Packers. It reviewed performance and technique and concluded that the two guards on a mediocre offensive line were inferior to two guards, both former starters, on the bench. The bench-sitters had held out in contract squabbles before the season.
The implication that Packers coach Lindy Infante was not playing his best players and that management revenge might be a reason prompted Infante to angrily deny the claim that day in a confrontation with another Press-Gazette reporter, in a phone call that day to Editor John Gibson, and, later, in an 800-word letter to the editor, which the paper ran.
Gibson says the decision to take away the column had ”nothing to do with Infante.” He says he has always been uneasy with beat writers` covering events and writing columns of opinion. He says McGinn`s column revived his doubts, and he made the decision before Infante called. McGinn was not told for five days.
Asked about other staffers who cover beats and write columns, he said:
”Those aren`t opinion columns. It`s not similar.” An uninvolved Press-Gazette reporter said: ”It looks like Infante had influence. It`s pretty discouraging.”
Pro football writers, just like coroners and hairstylists, have their own association. After learning the name of the president of the Professional Football Writers of America, our feet, not fingers, did the walking.
”Actions like these perpetuate the notion that newspapers and sports franchises enjoy the kind of cozy relationship that should have died with free rides on team trains,” said Don Pierson, pro football writer for the Tribune. ”It is disappointing that such decisions are made by editors who preach against even the appearance of impropriety,” he said.
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Last week brought the latest TV sweeps ratings and the usual horse-race coverage of who`s up or down. In Chicago, WMAQ-Ch. 5 was heralded for winning the financially important 10 p.m. news period. The real story may be that the WMAQ peacock is falling, as are its key competitors.
Comparing the Arbitron November sweeps ratings with those of November 1989 shows that Channel 5, WLS-Ch. 7 and WBBM-Ch. 2 lost a combined 14 percent of their 10 p.m. households, or 189,000 homes. (The other rating sevice, Nielsen, does not show as steep a drop.) These folks turn not to the New York Review of Books or cable, it appears, but to entertainment shows-such as
”Night Court” and ”M+A+S+H”-on WGN-Ch. 9, WFLD-Ch. 32, WPWR-Ch. 50 and WGBO-Ch. 66.
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The Sun-Times Co., formed by New York leveraged-buyout specialists Adler & Shaykin to buy the Chicago Sun-Times and other properties in 1986, has completed a long quest to refinance $150 million in debt, ostensibly stemming from its purchase of the paper.
It amounts to ”replacing old lending with new lending,” according to President Sam McKeel, with the refinancing presuming a shift to an urgently needed offset-printing facility in the next year.
There`s no cause for alarm among Sun-Times fans, though it`s no reason to break out champagne either. McKeel has told top managers that the refinancing doesn`t give the austerely run paper any more money to work with.
Meanwhile, Sun-Times Editor Dennis Britton discussed the paper candidly at a luncheon of the City Club of Chicago.
He cited Marshall Field V`s ”great disservice” in selling to Rupert Murdoch, implying that the deal inspired difficulties that the paper still grapples with. He also implored the assembled to advertise, since, ”We are a heavily leveraged company.”
He conceded that he has had to resist imploring from Sun-Times ad executives unhappy with what they deem an overabundance of coverage of black Chicago; revealed that, perhaps unknown to Los Angeles Times editors, he has called Times foreign reporters (he hired many while an editor there) and suggested stories that could be used by the Sun-Times via the Times wire service; and noted that Persian Gulf coverage hits home because his 30-year-old son is a master helmsman on the USS Missouri.
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Not seen spooling spaghetti, or engaging in the lively art of conversation, at Carlucci`s, Rosebud, Eli`s or the Drake`s Oak Terrace Room:
Patty Duke, John ”Duke” Wayne, Wayne Newton, Olivia Newton-John, John Lennon, the Lennon Sisters, Sister Sledge, Percy Sledge, Charles Percy, Prince Charles or Hal Prince.
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There`s nothing journalism likes better than regurgitating catchy categorizations.
”John Major, a trapeze artist`s son who rose from welfare recipient to Treasury chief, will be named Britain`s next prime minister today.” -Wall Street Journal, Nov. 28.
”John Major, a circus acrobat`s son . . .” -Chicago Tribune.
”Major, son of a circus trapeze artist . . .” -USA Today.
”Major, son of a circus trapeze performer . . .” -Baltimore Sun.
” `This stuff about him being a trapeze artist-well he was for a while, but that was only one of a huge number of different things he did, different careers he followed,` Major told The Sunday Telegraph last year” -New York Times.
But, admit it: ”son of trapeze artist” sounds better than ”son of a member of a vaudeville act, Drum & Major, which toured music halls,” which his father was, or ”son of a failed designer and manufacturer of garden gnomes” (decorations), which his father also was.
