When I was a part of an Ed Axelby situation
AKA the time Pete Thamel did a story about Binghamton University basketball
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the journalistic sin committed by Ed Axelby in the movie Blue Chips.
Long story short, Ed asked a question about an investigative piece he was working on in a full post-game press conference, thereby giving away his scoop to all of his competitors.
One of the reasons that this stood out to me as a cinematic journalistic misstep is that it happened to me in real life.
No, I wasn’t Ed Axelby in this situation.
I was one of the other guys.
In the 2000s, Pete Thamel showing up on your beat was like Jim Cantore coming to your town for The Weather Channel. You knew it wasn’t good.
In 2009, I was in what was my final season covering Binghamton University athletics for the Press & Sun-Bulletin. The Binghamton men’s basketball team was in the middle of its best Division I season, en route to an America East conference title and spot in the NCAA Tournament.1
Midway through conference play, Thamel — then at The New York Times — came to campus for a home game.
It wasn’t a huge surprise. For the previous two years, BU men’s basketball had been getting all sorts of national attention. The school had replaced Al Walker with Kevin Broadus, then a rising Georgetown assistant who had recruited a core of the Hoya’s 2007 Final Four team but who’s recruiting had raised questions.
Broadus, with the blessing of the athletic department, was aggressive in building BU into a conference contender, and the team made a lot of off-court news. Some of it was common to strong academic schools like Binghamton that made the jump to Division I sports.
Some of it was objectively hilarious, like when transfer guard Malik Alvin was arrested after shoplifting a box of condoms at the Vestal Wal-Mart and running over an old lady as he ran from security.2 Some of it was objectively horrible, like Miladin Kovacevic beating a fellow student literally to within an inch of his life and then fleeing the country in what turned into a legitimate international incident.
I covered all of these stories, along with our paper’s news reporters, as they happened. But Thamel’s arrival left me anxious. I called around to sources I had at the school and in the conference. What did he have? What was he on to? What did he know that I didn’t know? I worried a lot. I was afraid of being scooped on my own beat, of being owned by an outside paper. It had happened to me a few years earlier on the baseball beat and I was terrified it would happen here, too.3
I knew this at the time, and it’s even clearer in hindsight, but mine was the reaction of an anxious and insecure reporter who wasn’t as good at his job as he could have been. A good reporter is confident. I was not. A good reporter balances covering their beat with holding those they cover accountable, and I was not good at that. I was too scared about my access, too scared to really rock the boat, scared to have people mad at me or not talk to me. I was panicking, and power doesn’t panic.
Anyway, game day came and Thamel sat on press row for most of the game. He attended the post-game press conference, along with me, a reporter or two from the student newspaper, and reporters from the local TV affiliates. But he did not pull an Ed Axelby. He listened to our questions about the game itself, but never asked anything. He did not call out Broadus’ recruiting practices or the legal issues players seemed to continually face. He didn’t say a word.
After the press conference, he had a one-on-one interview with Broadus away from the rest of us. He kept his reporting to himself.
A few weeks later, the story came out. It was an honest overview of Binghamton’s move to Division I, detailing all of the things we had reported and a few new things as well. But to be honest, I read it with relief. I hadn’t been scooped. I certainly felt like I could have done my job better and was uneasy about the whole thing, but there was no bombshell. Those came later, mostly after I had left the paper.
But it was rightfully a big story. And Pete Thamel had it to himself because he did what Ed Axelby should have done.
They got thumped by Duke in the first round.
OK, this part of the story is much less hilarious. The woman was injured but OK, and Alvin apologized to her. But I will never forget my old editor Charlie Jaworski calling me to tell me about this story, and as he read “shoplifted a box of condoms from Wal-Mart” I just lost it.
Another story for another day, on in which former New York Mets minor leaguer Jose Coronado plays a prominent role.