Calls of the Wild Are the Root of Some Sports Department Hang-Ups

The silence around the sports department has been deafening this week. It always is the week after the Super Bowl.

But the weeks before are another story.

Anyone who doubts that America comes to a halt for this event, boring as it often ends up, need only spend November, December and January in our office, or that of any of our competitors, to learn the realities of life on Super Sunday.

Weddings, picnics, family outings and surprise parties all step aside in deference to Pete Rozelle’s annual extravaganza.

The callers this time of the year act as if they are all reading from the same prepared statement.

“I wonder if you could help me,” they always begin. “I’m planning a (fill in the event) for sometime in January and I wonder if you could tell me when the Super Bowl is scheduled, what time it starts and how long it is expected to last.”

No complaints from here. Those callers are the most courteous and easiest to please. The hardest to please and often the rudest are those in the midst of a hot bet, usually in the middle of a steamy bar.

Those calls also follow a pretty predictable course.

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“Hey!” the caller screams over the roar of a boisterous crowd, immediately dispensing with introductions, “Who won (fill in the blank with anything from the last Super Bowl to the first World Series)?”

If you tell the caller what he wants to hear, he lets out a whoop and hangs up. If you don’t, he starts to argue and tells you to go look it up in your nearest press guide.

You give your answer, you hang up the phone and wait anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds.

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Same background crowd. Same question. Different caller. Obviously the other side of the bet. This person will call only if the previous caller was satisfied with the answer he got.

The temptation here is to give the second caller the opposite answer just to make things more interesting when he hangs up. Like telling the first caller that, yes, the San Francisco 49ers won last year’s Super Bowl. And then telling the next caller that, yes, the Miami Dolphins won last year’s Super Bowl.

But we would never do anything like that.

You can get a pretty good idea when a local fast-food franchise is running a sports contest. Your first clue is when you get 47 consecutive calls asking who won the 1966 National League Cy Young Award.

People who don’t like a story or a point of view in the paper tend to write letters. The callers are usually more anxious to offer their own point of view and tend to be less combative than their pen pals.

And many callers tend to be informative, correcting errors they spot or offering ideas for stories.

Answering the phone in a sports department can often be challenging, always interesting, never predictable.

Personally, I have three favorites among the calls I’ve received.

One call to a small newspaper I once worked for came in after we had run a youth soccer picture supplied by a local team. The picture showed a kid scoring a goal with one of his teammates running up to his right. In order to better focus in on the scorer, we cut off the right side of the shot, including the teammate, before running it.

I got a call the same day.

“Excuse me,” the voice on the other end said, “but I saw that in yesterday’s paper you ran a shot of (let’s call him Joe Smith) scoring a goal.”

So far, so good.

“And I noticed you cut out the part showing (let’s call him Bobby Jones).”

We can now assume we are talking to Bobby Jones Sr.

“Well, I know that sometimes you run stories in two parts over two days,” the caller said, his voice growing softer as he expressed his faint hope, “and I was wondering if maybe--maybe--you were going to run the second part of this picture tomorrow.”

Call No. 2 came during a California Angels game in Kansas City.

“You an expert on baseball?” the caller wanted to know.

“I know a little about the sport,” I replied.

“How much?” insisted the caller, who obviously needed an expert.

“How much do you need?” I said.

“Well, you watching the Angel game on TV?” he asked.

As a matter of fact, we had it on in the office.

“OK,” he said, “we got a lot of money riding on this. See that waterfall back there in center field behind the pitcher?”

I did.

“Well I’ve got a friend who says it’s real, and I’m betting a wad it’s made of tin foil.”

That much of an expert I wasn’t.

My favorite call came during the World Series a few years ago. The first game had been rained out.

“Where in the heck is the Series?” an irate caller wanted to know. “I can’t get nothin’ on my TV.”

I informed the caller of the rain.

There was a long pause.

Then, in desperation, he asked, “Does that mean it won’t be on the radio either?”