To hear some reports, former New England Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss was going to be traded in the offseason. Then it was after Week 1 and his 17-minute “tirade” against the press. And then it was after he called Patriots quarterback Tom Brady “a girl.”
Yes, two guys who by all appearances got along fine, reportedly got into a tussle in the week leading up to the Patriots game against the Dolphins on Monday, October 4.
According to a CBS Sports report by former NFL general manager Charley Casserly, Moss and Brady had an argument and had to be separated. Casserly said that Brady had grown tired of the way Moss was behaving and at one point Brady told him to “shave his beard.”
“Moss countered, you need to get your hair cut. You look like a girl,” said Casserly, a former NFL GM.
Catfight!
Except, not really. No one will confirm the story. Now, no one would expect notoriously tight-lipped Patriots head coach Bill Belichick to confirm the story, and naturally, he did not, saying early this week that the alleged incident was “news to me.”
However, earlier today, Patriots defensive back Brandon Meriweather told Boston sports radio station WEEI that he also had not heard of anything as described above happening between Brady and Moss.
On NBC’s “Football Night in America” and in his SI.com column, “Monday Morning Quarterback”, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King noted that two highly placed sources within the Patriots’ organization called the report false. Then, Comcast SportsNet New England reported it as untrue as well.
So who do we believe? What’s the truth anymore?
On the heels of the Brett Favre saga, which is now under a heavy NFL investigation, how are we to believe anything unless it’s from the people directly involved? Better yet, the question is, where do news sources come from these days? How credible are they?
To me, this isn’t about a shave and a haircut, but whether or not our news coverage, sports or otherwise, has turned into an ongoing grocery checkout lane of OK Magazine, Star and People.
What happened to hard news reporting, with credible sources? Earlier this summer, there was the Jim Gray – Corey Pavin war of words, based on Gray quoting Pavin as saying Tiger Woods would be on the Ryder Cup team. Pavin denied it, Gray called him a liar and said that Pavin “was going down.”
Woods ended up on the Ryder Cup team.
The lines have been blurred before between reporters and the subjects they cover. Gray, for example, is known to be close with both Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. On the night Bryant was accused of sexual assault in 2003, Gray went on ESPN and defended Bryant’s character. And of course, Gray was the only other man on stage in early July as James announced his basketball future on the special, “The Decision.”
Ahmad Rashad, a former athlete himself, was close with Michael Jordan and O.J. Simpson. Rashad often gave softball-type interviews of Jordan, despite whispers of gambling and infidelity. One of my favorite current writers, Jason Whitlock, is close friends with former teammate Jeff George and generally campaigns for a team in need of a quarterback to look at George, despite his advancing age.
People play favorites all the time. Many politicians have had close ties with the media. One of my favorite stories is how John F. Kennedy kept the news of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 from leaking before he had a chance to address the nation by making a simple phone call to publisher Orville Dryfoos and urging him to hold the story. Dryfoos held the story, despite having held on the Bay of Pigs story a year earlier.
Friends tell friends tidbits of inside information all the time. It takes on new meaning when one is a reporter, or actively portraying one on television in between coaching jobs. Here’s the problem – the information received are basically bits and pieces of the truth.
Perhaps Moss and Brady were playfully talking to each other when the “shave your beard” and “cut your hair” comments were made. Friends and teammates playfully cut on each other all the time. If someone walks in and out of the room quickly, doesn’t get the context, the next thing you know, it’s on SportsCenter.
As Billy Chrystal depicted in the film “*61”, the newspapers often spoke of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle’s friendship falling apart during their pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single season home run record in 1961. TV reports would talk about how the two were at each others throats. Mantle and Maris would be simultaneously laughing at these bogus stories over dinner in the apartment they shared that season.
We should have learned this a thousand times before: we don’t know anything about these people. From Tiger Woods to Brett Favre, we don’t know who they are. But even more so, neither do the people covering them or interviewing them.
Most of the information we receive these days are “unconfirmed” reports appearing as news items. What happened to all of the primary sources? You know, actual firsthand accounts? At best, what we get in the current age of media are tertiary sources (compilations based on primary sources). Some are secondary sources, accounts based on evidence from primary sources.
What we all get now is “reports” or “unconfirmed reports” – naturally begging the question why we’d report on an unconfirmed report? If “details are sketchy” at the moment, then why are you on the air?
Just for fun, Google “Reporting unconfirmed reports.” You don’t get links on the first page to how to report or how not to report something that hasn’t been confirmed. Instead it’s stuff like this:
- Missouri headed to the Big Ten – Apr. 30, 2010
- Beyonce Knowles and Jay-Z pregnant – Mar. 26, 2010
- AP France Unconfirmed Report – Bin Laden Dead?
Turns out Bin Laden was just ‘very ill’, Nebraska went to the Big 10, not Missouri, and unless Beyonce is really good at hiding pregnancy weight for seven months, she’s not having a baby anytime soon.
We’d be better off with Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds, since our current news comes off like some combination of OK Magazine and TMZ. Just look at the screens of news channels: CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ESPN – rolling tickers on the bottom of the screen, sidebars; it’s information overload. Except it’s not information – it’s pieces of half-truths or used-to-be-true-five-hours-ago.
The lines have blurred between speculation and opinion, hard data and confirmed reports. And it’s everywhere. It’s a game of telephone, even in our own lives. I once met a friend for lunch and told him I had big news. He said he already heard: we were pregnant and moving to California.
That was news to me. The big news I had was about my dad and I scoring tickets to one of the last games in the old Yankee Stadium. I let the friend know I would be sure to let my wife know she was pregnant and that I should go, after all I had to start packing boxes.
In the current age, it seems we can trust voicemails, e-mails, texts, but we can’t trust a conversation between friends. And if we can’t trust those conversations, then think of the larger picture: where do you think what you see and hear on the radio, TV and in newspapers comes from? Conversations between friends, of course. It’s just these friends work in sports, politics and on Wall Street.
Better check your sources. Or perhaps your sources should check you.
worldbetweenlines.com 