no one in sports or anywhere else, including me, even looked up when the sound of human suffering, an anguished, frustrated scream, erupted from the middle of that department. “You pathetic mess!”
The sound came from Henry Garrows, one of the greatest sports writers in the history of the newspaper. Garrows attended sporting events but he didn’t write about games. Instead, he wrote about universal human themes like struggle and sacrifice and failure. Sports writing was cerebral for Garrows. It was creative and imaginative. Garrows wrote to make people see and he believed every story could be a masterpiece, every insight or turn of phrase a work of art. And Garrows was every bit the tortured artist.
As deadline approached, Garrows would prepare to create art by placing a liter bottle of diet cola just to the left of the computer screen, donning yellow noise-canceling headphones, belting himself to his chair and draping a large black shroud over the computer terminal and his head to create a light-proof tunnel between his eyes and the screen. Eliminating distraction and creating focus, Garrows believed, was the only way all of his genius could emerge in the short period of writing time mandated by covering sports news for newspapers on deadline.
The system was not foolproof, however, and Garrows, increasingly anguished as deadline closed in, would resort to verbal self-abuse, as in “you pathetic mess” and much worse. It happened frequently enough that no one commented or even looked up anymore. Staffers would, however, look up when the abuse escalated to include the physical. “You piece of worthless shit!” Garrows would howl and then pop himself in the jaw, hard, with his own clenched first. “You total screw-up!” Once, still belted to the chair, he knocked himself over and struggled like a turtle flipped on its back for several minutes before remembering to unlatch himself from the chair.
But tonight the muse was kinder and “you pathetic mess” apparently got the job done. There were no more explosions from Garrows.
Finally, Walker summoned me. “I think we’re ready to roll.” I scanned the story on the screen. It included lots of the detail I had gathered in pretty much the form I had given it to Walker.
“A pilot neglected to notify authorities that his airliner hit a telephone pole a half mile short of a Charlotte airport runway Tuesday night, bringing 121 people 20 feet from near-certain death,” the lead said. It was classic Walker: the story was good; an attempted cover-up was even better.
Walker hit the “send” button on the computer and the story went to the front-page editor on its way to the copy desk and then production. At this stage in the evening, this close to deadline, there would be no questions.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“I need to talk to you about that other story.”
“Sure,” he said with an enthusiasm that surprised me. It had been a long day for him. I hadn’t come in until afternoon. He started at 9:30 every morning, which meant he was due back at his desk in nine hours. But Walker loved a story. And if you had one, he wanted to know about it. I followed him to the conference room with the Famous Front Pages. Walker slouched in an easy chair with his feet on the coffee table. He leaned his head back against the pillows, balanced a Ticonderoga #2 pencil between his lip and his nose and closed his eyes.
“So watcha got?” he said, straining not to move his upper lip and upset the pencil.
I told him about Bradford Hall showing up in the newsroom, a reminder that the whole situation started with me just doing my normal nightshift job. I explained the basics of the Wallace Sampson story: a thirteen-year-old boy shot in the head with a deer rifle shortly after midnight following minor civil unrest, a murder apparently uninvestigated and unsolved despite widespread suspicions in the black community; a crusade by a wealthy Yankee plantation owner to solve the killing which had aroused opposition in his family.
What I didn’t get into is the personal commitment I had begun to feel. Some think reporters are supposed to be objective, to chronicle the events of life and not get involved in them. There is no question reporters can and must be fair and that a reporter has to take pains to ensure that all sides in a story are conveyed completely and accurately. That is a standard of the profession. But objectivity is impossible. Everyone, journalists included, has an opinion. Everyone is a product of their past.
“Walker,” I said, “the uninvestigated murder and Bradford Hall’s search for justice is the minimum we get. That in itself is a helluva story. And the maximum story we get is that we solve the murder.”
Walker sat upright. The Ticonderoga went flying. “Here’s what we need to do,” he said. “We’ll get all the great investigative reporters and line them up at the South Carolina border and we’ll have them ride high in the saddle through the state from the mountains to the sea. They’ll write stories they flush out as they go. It’ll be like hunters flushing out birds. My God! There’ll be Holy Shit, Mabel story after Holy Shit, Mabel story. Pulitzer Prize after Pulitzer Prize. There’s probably a million Sampson cases down there.”
“Let’s just start with this one.”
Walker sighed. “It is a good story. There’s just one problem. Hirtsboro isn’t in our circulation area. There are a lot of good stories out there. A lot of them. The Middle East. That’s a good story. The ferry crash in the Phillipines. That’s a good story. But we won’t be staffing them either because they are not in our circulation area.”
It was true. The Charlotte Times billed itself as the newspaper that covered the Carolinas from the Appalachians to the Atlantic and at one time that had been the case. But over the years, maintaining outlying circulation proved expensive. Charlotte-area advertisers had been reluctant to pay for distribution to people who would seldom travel to Charlotte to shop in their stores. So distribution to far-flung areas of the Carolinas like Hirtsboro had been cut back, at first restricted to single copy sales from racks and then eliminated entirely.
“Maybe there’s a local angle,” I pressed. “We won’t know unless we investigate.”
“What kind of local angle? Bradford Hall passes through Charlotte on the way to the plantation?”
“Walker, sometimes you have to do a story because it’s a good story. Hirtsboro isn’t in our circulation area but it isn’t in anyone else’s either. If we won’t do it, it won’t get done.”
“I’m not worried about stories in Hirtsboro not getting done. I’m worried about stories not getting done in Charlotte. Matt, in case you hadn’t noticed, we have six empty desks in the newsroom. Six reporting jobs I can’t fill. Why? Because the publisher has decided we’re in a hiring freeze. No hires until ad lineage improves and circulation starts going up again.”
“Uh, maybe we could improve the circulation numbers by not cutting back in places like Hirtsboro.”
Walker laughed. We both knew the newspaper’s business and marketing policies were suicidal. Cut back distribution, reduce the number of reporters and thereby stories in the paper, and then wring your hands wondering why fewer people are reading. Go figure. As managing editor, it was Walker’s job to represent management to the journalists. But Walker was enough of a journalist himself that he couldn’t pretend to defend top management’s decision-making when it was so obviously indefensible.
I felt an advantage and pressed ahead. “Walker, this is the kind of story that gets people reading wherever they live. It’s a Holy Shit, Mabel story. And it’s a story only a newspaper can give them, not TV or radio. It’s why we exist, for God’s sake.”
Walker closed his
