OFF THE RECORD ...

By: Allan Wolper Reflections On Baseball Coverage Via A Judeo-Christian Prism



Chad Curtis always has been a baseball player possessed. He does a forward
flip after throwing a baseball, slides into people, and runs bases with abandon.



And Curtis also prays as hard as he plays. He organizes team chapel meetings,
cleans raunchy magazines out of clubhouses, and lectures teammates against
playing rap songs with lewd lyrics.



When he was with the New York Yankees, he was a magnet for beat writers, a
literate guy you always went to for a quote. And his religious fervor was duly
noted. But one aspect of his behavior - a desire to save Jewish writers
from going to hell - was not published until this year, after he had been
traded to the Texas Rangers.



Jon Heyman, a Long Island, N.Y., Newsday columnist, mentioned it
matter-of-factly in an April 16 column that described Curtis' attempts to
persuade Yankee players to attend his Sunday chapel sessions: 'Curtis also
tried to convince some Jewish writers that they were making a big mistake
and needed to rethink their beliefs.'



It's the kind of stuff that gave John Rocker a place on New York's most-

wanted list. Politicians have been crushed for less. What took so long for
people to read about it - especially in New York, with the largest
Jewish population outside Israel?



'Chad was telling the writers that they might be damned, that they might go to
hell,' said Heyman, who is Jewish and who added that he never engaged
Curtis in any religious discussions. 'He was telling them why his religious
beliefs were correct and why they were taking a chance. I don't know how
they felt deep down about what he was saying.'



Suzyn Waldman, the Yankees' beat reporter for WFAN radio and a play-by-

play broadcaster for the Madison Square Garden (MSG) cable TV network,
argued that Curtis was not an anti-Semitic ranter. 'I understand why some
people might have been offended, but I wasn't one of them,' Waldman said.
'Chad wants to save people. He looks [at Jews] as if they are in a building
about to blow.'



Heyman said he held back his story on Curtis for the day when he could write
a comprehensive piece on his behavior. 'There are a lot of things that go on
that we don't write about,' said Heyman. 'The clubhouse is a second home to
the players. And we are guests there, to some degree. We tend to write about
things that affect their play. Chad's discussions about religion, as heated as
they were, did not affect the team's play.'



Murray Chass, a New York Times baseball writer who is Jewish,
thought Heyman's story should have been published when Curtis was still a
Yankee.



'If there is a reason to write it at all, it probably should be written at the time it
happens, unless it was inconsequential at the time and subsequent events
added perspective to it,' Chass said.



In this case, Chass would have liked to have read about Curtis' remarks when
he said them. 'I was not aware that he ever said that,' Chass said. 'It's highly
offensive telling people things like that.'



Stories about the problems encountered by minority journalists fill the pages
of newspapers, but Jewish journalists tend to keep their unhappy encounters to
themselves.



Chass himself is often mentioned by New York sportswriters as an example of
that head-in-the-sand behavior because of his testy relationship with Graig
Nettles, one of the best third basemen in Yankee history.



'He called me a greasy [expletive deleted],' said Chass, who insists that
Nettles was angry, not anti-Semitic. 'I was working as an official scorer for a
game and Nettles was upset about a call.'



Heyman, meanwhile, wondered why Chass has never written anything about
his problems with Nettles. 'I did write about Curtis,' Heyman said. Baseball
writers, like their colleagues on the political beat, are awash in inside
information and constantly weigh the publication of that material against what
it may cost them in sources.



'There is kind of an assumed off-the-record where people just talk and don't
expect that you'll publish it,' said Filip Bondy, a columnist for the New York
Daily News. 'You can't publish every-thing they say to you. They'd
never talk to you again.'





Curtis' religious escapades remained locked inside a small circle of
sportswriters for two years. No one complained to the Yankees. And Jack
Curry, the current president of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers
Association of America, said no protests were filed with him. 'Writers like to
work those things out for themselves,' Curry said.



The whole story still might get an airing. Curtis is writing a Sunday column
on religion for the Arlington (Texas) Morning News. He is
now a colleague.





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Allan Wolper (alfyjournal@email.msn.com)
writes the monthly Ethics Corner column for Editor & Publisher.











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