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Good morning, folks.
I’ve received a fair bit of feedback on the series we recently ran on disgraced hockey coach Graham James.
A lot of you were very complimentary of Jeff Hamilton’s work. The emails mostly read something like this:
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Really good coverage by Jeff H.
Should win an award for his work!
A number of you, however, questioned the timing of its publication. Those emails read something like this:
Is it necessary for the Free Press to carry the Graham James story on the front page… During this disappointing Christmas season. Can’t we have something positive on the front page and put the James story inside?
Or…
A Christmas Story????? Whose idea was that? A full week of several pages.
Wrong in so many ways. Lots of memories… many not so good.
OK Steven… how about some local sports heroes?
Only my late mother ever really called me Steven — usually when she was attempting to reprimand me for something. But this particular reader has known me since I was a teenager, when I required plenty of reprimanding, so…
Graham James
One thing I’ve learned in this gig, is you can’t make everyone happy all the time. But I do appreciate feedback on both sides of the coin, so here’s a brief explanation on the timing of A Stain on Our Game: The life and destructive legacy of Graham James.
The No. 1 reason we published it when we did is simple: that’s when it was done.
Ideally, we would have published the series sometime in October or November, but more details continued to surface, and in a project that was already years in the making we had no interest in Jeff hurrying something that we felt was important to get right.
However, we did want it published before the holiday season — this week would not have been good timing — and before the NHL got going again.
So, we gave Jeff a hard deadline to be done by Dec. 1 with a publication target of Dec. 12. He’d previously asked for an extension or five, but this one he met.
But most importantly, we wanted to publish it when it was true to the victims of James.
And I’m hoping that Sheldon Kennedy, Jay Macauley, Greg Gilhooly, Theo Fleury, and others will have a less disappointing Christmas season in 2020 as a result of Jeff’s work.
As for the suggestion to do some stories on local sports heroes, I feel like we’ve done a story on every single one of them since March. Trust me, we’ve been looking for everything and anything to write about during the pandemic while most sports have been shut down. But if you have any suggestions, please pass them along.
As always, you can reach me by replying to this mailing or by sending me an email here.
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