I ran into a Yankee fan yesterday at work and the first thing he says to me is that Alex Rodriguez is a bum. This reminded me of something I read recently in Robert Lipsyte’s book, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland (Lipsyte was a reporter then a columnist for the Times during the sixties–and later, in nineties–and is particularly famous for his coverage of Ali. This book is out-of-print, but worth checking out if you run across it in a used bookstore):

“A sportswriter learns early that his readers are primarily interested in the affirmation of their faiths and their prejudices, which are invariably based on previous erroneous reports. They do not want fact that conflict with preconceptions.”

Which also brings to mind, what the newspaper man tells Jimmy Stewart at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance:

“This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Having said all that, of course, Derek Jeter is getting ripped in the local papers today.