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Cheerleaders or Reporters?

The UConn beat exemplifies the blurry line between sports journalist and fan.

By Ken Krayeske

Sitting on the baseline at Gampel Pavilion in Storrs, I focus my camera on the game action. UConn's Ricky Moore dishes to Kevin Freeman, who lays it up and in. The crowd roars with approval, and although I've no time to celebrate, the excitement sends shivers up my spine.

After attending more than a dozen UConn men's and women's games this year, some from the stands and some from press row, I find differentiating between the basketball fan in me and the professional journalist is not easy.

It doesn't help when other reporters refer to the Huskies as "we." They talk of how Richard Hamilton needs to shoot better from the 3-point line or how Svetlana Abrosimova is playing too tentatively. From the view under the basket, I scan the crowd, knowing they would all love to be where I am -- up close, almost part of the action. Struggling to maintain my journalist's objectivity, I'm ashamed to be so swept up by Huskymania.

The scenario is not unique to me. Sports has replaced religion as the common social thread, according to University of New Haven sports management professor Allen Sack. He says it's hard for individuals to extricate themselves, especially when group psychology takes over in a stadium.

It's even tougher for "the Horde," the 40 to 60 radio, television and print journalists whose beats are Huskies hoops. "Sports writers have always had complex and confusing relationships with the teams they cover," says sports culture expert and University of Hartford President Walt Harrison. "Sports writers by nature want to be impartial, but when they are beat writers or columnists who cover a single team, they're so close it is difficult to maintain an appropriate distance."

The result is that it's very rare for print reporters not to root for the team they cover, according to Sports Illustrated columnist Frank Deford. "If you covered a team for months and months and months and you don't get attached to the team, there's something wrong with you. That's human nature," he says. "I think it's idiotic to presume these guys are objective journalists."

While readers may expect sports writers to be fans themselves, Harrison says, they may not understand the balancing acts sports journalists do to hide their own fan loyalties, to write objectively and not lose access to the teams, coaches and players, and to think independently despite their newspaper's marketing tie-ins with the events they cover.

At a time when professional and college athletics generate millions for big businesses, citizens can't afford to have the line between sports journalist and fan grow blurry, especially when those teams rely on taxpayer support. But with corporate media conglomerates now owning teams, coverage probably won't improve, Harrison warns. "I don't see any way out," he says. "Newspapers are trying to cover what is a complex thing. Add to it civic boosterism, and I think it gets very difficult to do."

Take UConn basketball, whose rise to national prominence over the last 10 years has forced it and the media covering the teams to contend with these often conflicting pressures.

A sports writer never wants to lose professional respect and be considered a "homer," says a former print reporter who doesn't want his name used but who covered UConn men's and women's basketball for a decade.

Cheerleading starts when kids grow up dreaming of covering pro or big-time college sports teams, says Jon Secia, the sports information director at Santa Barbara College in Los Angeles. "Once they get there and realize their dream, they still have the fan in them," he says.

Professionals learn to keep it in check, says former Waterbury Republican-American beat writer Adrian Wojnarowski. "I grew up in Bristol. I sat by the radio, listening to games," he says. "When I got there I was a journalist, covering the team. Any of those feelings you had as a kid are gone. Your job is to be the eyes and ears for readers. I wrote what I saw.

"I prided myself on reporting and the relationships I developed. It helped make me an insider to know what was going on there. At the same time, the distance you kept was in terms of not letting relationships color coverage and jade what you knew what needed to be reported," he says.

That's not always the case, however. During UConn basketball's rise to national prominence in the early 1990s, says former Connecticut Post staffer Les Carpenter, some reporters might as well have worn pom-poms. Part of it was fanaticism, he says, but just as much could be blamed on complacency or self-interest, with some journalists figuring positive coverage might be a wise career move.

Before UConn men's basketball coach Jim Calhoun and women's coach Geno Auriemma transformed UConn into national leaders, the Huskies hoops beat was a sleeper, covered by two or three papers. Stories didn't demand more than basic play-by-play and obligatory quotes from coaches.

"In 1985, Geno Auriemma begged us to cover women's games," says Ken Davis, the Hartford Courant's national college basketball reporter. As the Huskies racked up wins and tournament appearances and reader surveys asked for more, and coverage of Huskymania increased.

"We've gone from the point where I was the only beat writer in 1985 to now where we have two, one the men's, two on the women's, and a columnist, and they created a position for me as a national writer," Davis says.

But not all who covered the team measured up to the task. The UConn beat was considered a "homer" beat by other college writers around the country because of the actions of a few reporters, Wojnarowski says.

For a few years in the mid-'90s, the men's beat among state reporters was contentious. The close-knit Connecticut reporters stiffened up as the Huskies attracted national attention, trying to protect their position by sucking up to the teams, Carpenter says. No one -- not the school nor the Horde -- was ready for the publicity.

"The story got so big on UConn, it went from being a regional provincial thing, to being something where the entire state cared. Nothing had ever galvanized the state like that," Carpenter says. "This is a beat that really didn't look for controversy or look to get inside the story.

"There was some kind of internal pressure put on by other reporters to cover the team in a certain way," he says. In 1990, when the UConn men won the Big East tournament and went on to the Elite Eight in the NCAA tournament, reporters apparently high-fived players as if they were all part of the same team.

The women's team was no different. In 1995, when the women were a minute from an undefeated season and a national championship, Bruce Berlet of the Hartford Courant allegedly stood up on press row, waved his arms and shouted, "No Fouls! No Fouls!" Berlet, who now covers golf, and sports editor Jeff Otterbein could not be reached, and Courant corporate affairs manager Ken Delisa had no comment on the incident or Berlet's change in beats.

College sports are mythically amateur, says professor Sack, explaining that for all intents and purposes colleges field professional teams. As such, reporters can no longer sit on their laurels and write simple game stories. Sports is now news, and writers sometimes have to cover scandals ranging from point-shaving to illegal recruiting to player payoffs. Increasingly, sports coverage has required the same discipline and depth one would expect to see in coverage of government.

UConn beat writers have had trouble adjusting to this. Up until 1994, when UConn starting forward Toraino Walker left the team without reason, most coverage did not entail digging.

Go back 30 years, though, and the UCLA run of 10 national basketball championships that laid the groundwork for puff-pastry sports writing "We all know that Sam Gilbert [a rich Los Angeles businessman] was the sugar daddy for UCLA basketball players [in the early 1970s]," Secia says. Gilbert lavished players and coaches with illegal gifts.

In 1990, Gilbert died three days before the federal government was to indict him for laundering drug money at his Bicycle Club Casino in Los Angeles. "But [any connection between Gilbert and the team] was untouchable because it was [UCLA coach] John Wooden territory. Everybody knew what was going on at UCLA, just as they did at the Kennedy White House, but nobody did anything about it. People are reporting it now," he says, but then, it was good for college basketball to sweep it under the rug.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), while it mandated open locker rooms in 1973, has a marketing plan that enables lazy reporting, Secia says. In the cases of Indiana coach Bobby Knight and former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian, the NCAA played favorites. The NCAA allows Knight, who utters something reprehensible regularly, to manipulate the media because it sells basketball. "He has a reputation and he can humiliate you in front of your peers and your boss," Secia says.

But with Tarkanian, once he challenged UCLA's supremacy in the 1970s while at Long Beach State, he was targeted, Secia says. "They pick a pariah because they can, and they want to," Secia says. Because Tarkanian wasn't allowed due process during hearings regarding UNLV, he won a court settlement against the NCAA.

In the case of UConn, tough coverage helped the school grow up and be one of the premier programs in the country, Wojnarowski says. At the same time, "The Connecticut media, the Horde, had to go through the process, and in some ways they were dragged kicking and screaming into it."

The Huskies, too, have had mixed success in dealing with hard-hitting reporting. When the UConn scandal broke over Ray Allen receiving a $200 beeper and Ricky Moore and Kirk King getting plane tickets and small amounts of money, papers covered it fairly, says the anonymous reporter.

"None of the papers pulled punches in terms of coverage. They got the stories and reported it as best as they could," the former UConn reporter says. "That's not as hard as stepping out on your own and writing critical things. Obviously everyone was going to have to cover that. If there is a group that shares the opinion, it makes it easier to express the opinion."

UConn was lauded for its honesty in dealing with the story, holding a press conference the morning the allegations surfaced. All this helped the process, the reporter says, and helped lead to further allegations of illegal gifts and inducements to former UMass star Marcus Camby.

But there was another side, unseen by the public. Wojnarowski remembers how UConn athletic staffers would privately foment internal bickering and backbiting among the press corps. "It was all very childish. Connecticut had a unique thing. There was an unhealthy comfort zone between the UConn program and the people who covered it. It had to change, it really did. It wasn't good for anybody.

"For a long time, UConn wanted to be covered like a big-time program, but then it ultimately had trouble handling the honest and fair-minded critiques that go along with that," he says.

It still does. According to Tim Tolokan, UConn's associate director of athletics and communications, there's a right way and a wrong way to cover UConn basketball.

For Tolokan, the right way is for reporters to be fans of the game, if not of the team they cover. "We have a season that is terminal in nature and ends with a championship. I think writers would want to be able to continue covering something I think is very important, deep into that season. Why wouldn't you, without being a fan, want the team you're covering to be there?"

Thus, anything that might interfere with a team's mission would be the wrong way...and to make its point the team can cut off a reporter's access to the team, its coaches and players.

For example, after the Seton Hall game Jan. 23 and my commentary on Calhoun's on-court swearing antics, Tolokan denied me prearranged interviews with men's players. He guaranteed game credentials and access to open practices, but he said one-on-one, half-hour sessions were now impossible for a reporter with "an agenda."

In another case, Calhoun didn't talk to WFAN radio's Mike Francesca and Chris "Mad Dog" Russo for six years after they called Rod Sellers a thug. Sellers and Duke University's Christian Laettner battled during the Elite Eight game in 1990 that UConn lost on a last second shot.

The fear of being locked out weighs heavily, says the former UConn reporter. "You run the risk of having access limited the more negative you are. The hard thing is walking a tightrope of needing access in order to do the job well but also being a straight shooter," the writer says.

Public universities should never lock out a writer, says Shelly Poe, the sports information director at the University of West Virginia. "I don't think we are really ever in a place where we block access. At a state school, you'd be quite pressed to do that," she says.

Besides limiting access or doling out prime spots for photographers at games, schools have other ways to steer coverage. Most schools, UConn included, contract radio announcers to broadcast games. The school's relationship with WTIC-AM dates back decades.

The current contract, signed in 1995 and valued at about $700,000 ($225,000 in basic rights), has WTIC's 50,000 watts broadcasting all Huskies men's basketball and football games through 2001.

In 1995, WTIC paid $12,000 to air 20 women's games and post-season contests as permitted. The full women's schedule now brings UConn more than $70,000, Tolokan says. There's $15,000 in rights, $15,000 for the coach's show, $36,000 from time UConn is allowed to sell, $5,000 in promotional time and UConn receives five percent of the total ad revenue.

UConn, like other college and professional teams that hire broadcast teams, expects biased coverage.

"Although lots of time the payment comes through the radio station, you're effectively working for the team," Sports Illustrated's Deford says. "You can't be altogether honest even if you want to be, if you're being paid directly or indirectly by the team." You can be honest, but not objective.

It's a policy that cost Tim McCarver a job with the New York Mets and John Miller his spot in the Baltimore Orioles' booth. Both baseball broadcasters were let go because they spoke their opinions too many times for management.

West Virginia's Poe says she expects her broadcasters to pitch the school line. "When they're on the air for us, they better be rooting for the Mountaineers," she says. "When they're working for the station, they can have their own latitude. When they're working for us, they promote and give information about the basketball team. They're getting paid by the state of West Virginia to do so. It's different than a reporter just covering the game."

Fans understand the difference between the game broadcast and the announcer's own editorial show, Poe says.

Secia in Los Angeles isn't so sure. Distinguishing between paid coverage and actual reporting can be tough, especially when media outlets like Rupert Murdoch's News' Corp. owns baseball's Los Angeles Dodgers and Time-Warner owns the Atlanta Braves.

The tensions only increase when corporate media outlets sponsor events. The Hartford Courant has ponied up $30,000 in cash and $70,000 in ads to UConn athletics for the past seven years, according to UConn assistant athletic director of marketing Paul Pendergast. The whole contract is worth about $120,000 annually.

It's strictly a business relationship, the same way Bob's clothing stores or First Union bank sponsors the Huskies, Pendergast says. The Courant's Delisa says that the marketing decision is completely separate from the editorial staff.

But it doesn't hurt, either. Bob Stowell, the Huskies official sports photographer, says before the UConn men squared off against Boston College Feb. 10, the Courant's photo of UConn's new inflatable mascot Big Blue on the cover of its Courtside supplement guaranteed their photographers the best baseline spots. Tolokan says photographers' spots are based on daily circulation, as per the NCAA handbook.

And every time the Courant's Davis hears the sponsorship announced over the PA system at the Civic Center, he doesn't like it. "It casts us in a negative light," Davis says. "No one has ever said, 'You have to write positive stories.'"

He says the perception of positive and negative coverage depends on the reader. "UConn accuses us of being too negative. Our readers accuse us of being too positive," he says. "Our main objective is to provide the readership what you want to know about."

Photos by Ken Krayeske

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