Not the Best Headline

Many years ago, I worked on my college newspaper at Brandeis University, eventually climbing the ladder to Editor in Chief. It's the place I first started writing well, and I learned to edit other people's writing as well as my own.

At a small college, they can't get enough people to work on the paper, and so they'll take you on whether you have talent or not. As a result, I was made Asst. News Editor in a matter of a few weeks. Actually, there were 2 of us, another freshman named Murray somethingorother, and me. A few more weeks later the News Editor with the ironic name of David Ashkenazi* burned out and quit. One of us new freshmen was going to be made News Editor, a significant position on the paper. The other, well, he wasn't.

The other guy was me.

*Ashkenasi is an ironic name because almost all people who are named Ashkenazi aren't. For those who don't know about this, Ashkenazi Jews are from Europe, Sephardic Jews are from the Middle East and North Africa by way of the Iberian Peninsula. Sephardic Jews generally were expelled by from Spain in the late 1400's. Jews named Ashkenazi got to their Middle East/North Africa future homes later than the initial Sephardim, who referred to them as Ashkenazi, hence their name. That piece of history cracks me up.

I eventually was made News Editor the following year when Murray burned out. I think he got the job because at the time he wrote better than I did, but also, I had shown the Editor in Chief, a guy who went on to become a real editor (of Newsday), that I had some talent for physically putting the paper together and writing headlines. Back in the day, it was a huge, physical cut-and-paste job, not the computerized version we have today. He and I spent the next year and a half on Monday night putting the paper to bed by handling the final layout in the printer's shop. In fact, I was so good at doing this (probably better than at editing) that he created a position called "Technical Editor". It means nothing, but basically I handled the physical production of the paper, in addition to writing news articles and the occasional feature piece. It was fun, probably the most fun job I had on the paper.

Anyway, for most of the time I worked on the paper, I wrote a large number of the headlines. Headline writing is a hoot, particularly if you can find a way to make them funny. Every year Brandeis would play Bates College (in Maine) in most sports, but particularly in basketball, the only sport anyone at the school paid any attention to. We always clobbered Bates College. It was a tradition. And of course (like many schools in New England) we had a tradtion at the paper that following our annual win by the Brandeis Judges over Bates College, there would be a big two deck headline at the top of the back page of the paper, the sports page, the first line of which was always the same:

Judges Master Bates

There was an annual contest each year to write the second deck of the headline, something disgusting in a subtle way. The entire school looked forward to seeing it. I'm proud to say I wrote two of those second decks that got published. In my freshman year the Sports Editor wrote the following headline:

Judges Master Bates
Spurt After Clark Defeat

A beautiful sentiment.

I wrote the second deck the next two years. It may have helped that I was in charge of headlines, but I'm proud of my product nonetheless.

In 1972 I wrote:

Judges Master Bates
Cream Clark in Opener

The following year, the paper and I reached a new low with:

Judges Master Bates
With Come-From-Behind Thrust

After learning to juggle (my thanks to Dave "Tree" Horowitz and the boys in Shapiro Hall), this was the high point of my 4 years in the Boston area.

Anyway, that's a Joe Pos type absurd lead-in to this horrible headline I just saw today on Yahoo:

Oregon upsets No. 6 California 42-3

Now I did not go to Cal, but I've always rooted for them. It's not what they are saying that is so bad, but how they said it. Any team who loses 42-3 really wasn't good enough for it to be an upset. Obviously Oregon is way, way, way better than Cal. If you thought that was an upset, you so overrated Cal and so underrated Oregon that you really deserved to lose a lot of money betting this game, particularly if you were giving points.

It's not an upset. It's a misevaluation by the sporting public of the quality of the two teams, and given they were #6, an enormous overvaluation of Cal. It is not unlike a couple of years ago when Cal was rated #2, and then the #1 team got beat, and for 10 minutes Cal was #1. But then Cal lost like 5 straight games. Is it possible that Jeff Tedford is the most overrated coach in college football?

Meanwhile, let me have a crack at the headline:

Ducks Cream Bears
Judges Master Bates