The weather is warming. The flowers are blooming. The birds are chirping.
Spring, at long last, has finally emerged in Northeast Ohio. And in the spirit of the long-awaited transition to the season of rebirth and happiness, now would be a good time for a lighter Round 2 and to give readers another peek behind the curtain of life as a journalist. Enjoy!
With friends like this…
I count Record-Courier sports writer Jonah Rosenblum as one of my friends. Jonah is a fantastic writer and a sincerely kind, humble and decent human being.
I come from a long line of proud Hardesty pranksters.
That combination made for a very unfortunate night several years ago for my then-coworker at the Record-Courier — although, in fairness, I didn’t originally intend for it to be quite as unfortunate as it turned out to be.
Jonah, as he does now for the R-C, covered Portage County high school sports, and on the night in question our intrepid reporter was on the scene for the Rootstown girls soccer team in the postseason tournaments. Yours truly, as assistant sports editor, was squirreled away in the office back in Kent, putting together the next morning’s sports section — of which Jonah’s story would be an integral part.
As was customary, I kept in touch with Jonah throughout the game via text messages. As the night wore on, it became apparent that the game could be headed to overtime.
This wasn’t good. Any night game we were covering that went to OT, regardless of sport, was a serious fly in the ointment. We had a hard and fast deadline each night of getting the paper out, and in those days getting the paper out meant the last page of the sports section had to be electronically sent to the paginators at the company’s production property in Wooster by 10:45 p.m. so they had a snowball’s chance of hitting their 11:15 p.m. deadline.
And 10:45 p.m. didn’t mean 10:46 p.m. It was 10:45 p.m., and if that deadline was missed, you could fully expect an email to be waiting for you in your inbox the next day inquiring as to why you missed the deadline. And the brass didn’t want to hear about overtime games. Some of them, I was absolutely convinced, had no idea what overtime even meant (and I mean that in every sense, but I digress).
So any game that went overtime ratcheted up the stress level several notches on reporter and editor alike, and that night was no different. The game, indeed, went to overtime. I could almost see the sweat dripping off Jonah’s words as he texted me the bad news.
We were going to be right up against the deadline. At that point, Jonah being able to do his postgame interviews, write the story and get it to me by 10:45 was 50-50 — at best. It would take a Herculean effort on his part to make the deadline.
My trap was set.
Then things turned even worse. Jonah texted again. The game was headed to overtime No. 2. Panic was setting in on his end of the phone.
A short while later, more bad news. The game was now going to a shootout. Jonah, clearly distressed by this point, texted that there was no way he could meet the deadline.
I messaged Wooster through our intra-company system and told them the situation. They said as long as they had all the other sports pages and that Jonah’s soccer story was the last thing they needed to place on the page, we should be in good shape. They also said they would make a note that the game ran very late, so Jonah would not be held accountable for missing deadline.
I devilishly kept those important pieces of information from Jonah. I had a plan to execute, after all.
Instead, I told him to do everything he could to make 10:45 because Wooster wasn’t budging on the deadline. Not mincing words, Jonah texted back saying (paraphrasing here) it was ridiculous that he was still expected to make deadline, that the circumstances were beyond his control and he was doing the best he could.
I had never heard Jonah like that. Normally calm and unflappable, he was revealing a, shall we say, raw side I hadn’t seen.
The plan was falling into place quite nicely.
Not long after, another text from Jonah. The game was finally over. Instead of relief, I sensed even further panic from him as he now had maybe a grand total of 15 minutes to write his story.
At 10:47, his story came through. This was far better than I had hoped, and I knew the good folks at Wooster would be pleased. We were thinking after 11 for sure. Jonah’s hard work and professionalism had saved the day. Wooster would make its 11:15 p.m. deadline.
Except Jonah knew none of that.
I waited a few minutes before answering him, then texted him back with the fake news that Wooster was not at all pleased at receiving his story at 10:47 and they were writing him up for missing deadline.
I figured Jonah would get a good laugh out of it, realizing by now he had been gaslighted.
Not so much.
The texts he fired back were … well, let’s just say I thought there was a good chance he might make the news in China. Jonah was incensed that Wooster would be so callous after he had worked his — worked so hard to get the story in on time in an impossible situation. And that even so, he still only was late by two measly minutes.
I mean, Jonah was frosted. You wouldn’t have wanted to get in his way at that moment. I could picture the proverbial cartoon character with a beet-red face and smoke pouring out of his ears, his reporter’s bag slung over his shoulder as he stomped Godzilla-like back to his car.
I was laughing out loud in the office.
Just as I was about to tell him the joke was on him, the joke was about to be on me. His final text said something to the effect that he was alerting our sports editor, Tom Nader — who was home enjoying a night off that was about to not be enjoyable at all — as to what Wooster was doing and that Tom, as the sports editor, needed to contact them immediately and strongly demand that Jonah not be held accountable for the two-minute missed deadline.
Suddenly, it wasn’t funny anymore. I was the only person in on the joke, and the last thing I needed was for the unsuspecting folks at Wooster getting taken to task for something they knew nothing about. They were about to get blindsided.
I had to get out in front of this before it was too late. Then a text came through on my phone. It was Tom Nader. Too late.
Concerned, he asked me what was going on, why was Wooster being so unreasonable when Jonah did nothing wrong and still got his story finished in a remarkably short period of time. I asked Tom if he had contacted Wooster yet. He said no, he wanted to get some information from me first.
Finally, some good news.
I explained my devious trick to Tom, who was relieved to hear it was just a prank but also made it clear that Jonah needed to be brought up to speed immediately because he was really hot. And Tom also politely asked that I not do anything similar in the future, because the next time it may not be caught before it was too late.
I delicately told Jonah that it had all been an innocent gag, and I had been in touch with Wooster the whole time. I explained to him that Wooster was totally good with his 10:47 story filing, they would make their deadline, no one was going to be written up, and the sun would rise yet again in the morning.
All things considered, Jonah took the news well — surely more out of relief than anything else. In true Jonah fashion, he even commended me for the prank as being well-played, admitting, “You got me. You really had me going.”
Today, Jonah smiles good-naturedly when the subject of The Prank comes up. But just behind the grin is a certain look in his eye that says, ‘I don’t know where, I don’t know how, and I don’t know when, but I will get you back.’
Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.
GPS, where art thou?
In my days as high school beat writer at the Record-Courier, one of my jobs was to cover the state track and field tournament, which at that time in the late 1990s was held at the University of Dayton’s Welcome Stadium.
One particular year, I covered the tournament with fellow R-C sports writer David Carducci, who was sent to Dayton with me to provide additional coverage for the meet. We arrived at our hotel the night before the meet so as to avoid a three-hour-plus drive in the morning, freeing us from the stress of trying to make it to the start of the meet on time. We would get a good night’s rest and only have a short drive to the stadium the next morning.
That was the plan.
The next morning, we left for the stadium a good 45 minutes before the first event, which one of our relay teams had a very good chance of winning. Dave drove that year, so we were jamming some tunes in the car as he pulled out of the hotel parking lot, drove down the main drag a little ways and hopped on the expressway. We would be there in no time.
We chatted as we drove along, looking for our exit. I began to sense that it was farther away than we had anticipated. A few minutes later, Dave noticed too and we openly wondered if we had missed it. We knew it was the right expressway, as we had checked and double-checked the night before. Apparently, we had misjudged the actual distance from the hotel to Welcome Stadium.
By this time, the clock was working against us. Our 45-minute cushion was eroding quickly, and the sign for our exit was nowhere in sight. Dave stepped on the accelerator, the car barreling down the highway as he weaved in and out of traffic in our effort to get to the stadium on time.
Finally, after more than a half-hour of driving — much of it well above the speed limit — the sign for Welcome Stadium appeared. We would have mere minutes to get off the exit, park, hustle to the media gate, get inside the stadium and rush to the media corral adjacent to the track to watch that first race.
Dave pulled the car off the exit, turned onto the main drag and prepared to pull into the parking lot. It was going to be tight.
As Dave turned into the stadium parking lot, up ahead of us on the same side of the road was a sign to the entrance of our hotel parking lot a couple blocks away. We had been maybe two minutes away from the stadium when we left the hotel if we had only turned left out of the parking lot. Instead, we turned right and unwittingly took a nearly 40-minute — and somewhat dangerous — circle around Dayton.
At least we made it on time — kind of. In a rush, we arrived at the media corral with seconds to spare as the last lap of the 4×800-meter relay race was in progress. Our team won, and Dave and I conducted our post-race interviews as we normally would. No one was the wiser.
We didn’t get to see the first seven laps of the race, but I’m sure they went a lot more smoothly than our one unnecessary lap around Dayton.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.