THE WANDERING GOLFER: BRENDAN MOLONEY
When the final edition of the Melbourne Age newspaper produced with metal type was put to bed in 1983 I souvenired a slug of lead bearing the famous “We were wrong” insignia.
While most papers of the era tried to ignore or weasel their way out of mistakes and only acknowledged them under threat of expensive legal action or public outrage, The Age put its hand up and righted its wrongs.
Last month’s column in this magazine mentioned a golf writer’s dinner held on a boat in Sydney. This was incorrect. It was in Melbourne and I was there. It was not an earth shattering error but it was wrong and made worse by the fact that this lamentable lapse of memory was picked up by a colleague far, far older than me.
This single column (11.5 ems in printer’s measure or a tad under two inches) block of type is sitting on my computer as I write, both admonishing and jogging the memory about printed gaffes over the years. One of the best, or worst depending on your perspective, was The Age (referred to as the ‘Spencer Street Soviet’ by its centre and right-wing detractors) running a story that claimed the West Indies cricketers had tanked their one-day game against Australia in January 1982.
The headline, “Come on $ come on”, immediately caught the attention of captain Clive Lloyd, who sued and won a reputed $1 million, a fortune in those days. The editorial executive, who declined to refer the story to the company’s lawyer in the first place remained employed while we did not get a pay-rise for five years. Furthermore, we had to sit through a boring and uninformative lecture on the law affecting journalism. We all knew a damn sight more about it than the lawyer who gave it.
On the golfing front, the emerging Aaron Baddeley took some scribes by surprise and when he hit the lead in a big pro event as an amateur, a colleague writing furiously on deadline asked: “What do you know about this kid?” I told him I thought he had been rubbed out briefly for chucking a club or similar indiscretion. This appeared in his paper but c
The Baddeleys, the most decent, kind and friendly people you could ever hope to meet, appeared outside the press tent the next morning asking to speak to the culprit. It looked as if there had been a death in the family. When told the information came from me, they still insisted on seeing him, so I sat them down in the interview room, made them a cup of tea and went off to find him. The abiding memory is father Ron saying: “Even if it was true, why would you write it?” We had no answers. Then, with our colleagues outside straining to hear what was going on, he gave us a list of phone numbers that would reach Aaron or him any time of the night or day if we ever needed to check a story. To a golf writer, this was gold and the guys outside were green with envy.
Their mood did not improve the next day when the paper ran a skanky correction that started: “It was incorrectly reported in some sections of the media yesterday...”
The most famous wrongful death report was of the great American writer Mark Twain, who brilliantly dismissed it as “exaggerated”. Noted sportswriter Mike Sheahan was a bit stiff when the St Kilda Football Club phoned The Age in the late 1970s to announce that player Wels Eicke, born in 1893, had died. Sheahan wrote a nice obituary which drew a Twain-like response. Wels (short for Wellesley) was still alive. What are the odds of two blokes having a name like that and living, unaware of each other, two streets apart in the suburb of Prahran?
I did a similar thing to Ted Naismith, who was prominent with his cousin George in pro golf before and after World War II. Confusing him with George, who won the 1937 Australian Open and had both Peter Thomson and David Graham as trainees at Riversdale GC, my story referred to him as the late Ted Naismith. He rang the next day to say that it did not worry him but many of his friends were quite concerned. The correction was duly made and life went on. At the time I needed a nom de plume. This was necessary in an era when salesmen selling Holdens could not go moonlighting and sell Fords on the weekend. To make ends meet and support my family I had to write for other publications on the sly. The name I chose was Ted Lazarus because I brought him back from the dead.
Ted got a bit too big for his boots and won a golf-writing award. I had to lie to the late (subs: correct) George Begg, secretary of the golf writers association, that he was an intensely private person and had asked me to accept the award on his behalf. In a way, this column is all George’s fault because the mistake referred to at the beginning was in his obituary last month. The final straw was a drunken colleague remarking that Ted was a much better writer than me. On the strength of that I made him redundant.
My worst mistake in a long career was in 1969 on The Sun in Melbourne while sub-editing the race results as part of my cadet training. I inadvertently moved the decimal point one place to the right, giving a man who had backed a winner that paid $10 the impression that he had won $100. He went out and spent $100 and was incredibly angry when he got to the tote and learnt the true value of his bet. He phoned Alan Dunn, the sports editor, at six o’clock every night for a week. Dunn handed me the phone with orders not to hang up on the guy and cop a tirade that lasted a good five minutes and touched on my intelligence, parentage and weird sexual preferences. So far, touch wood, I have not been sued. A lawyer would be much worse.