This has been boiling over for a few days now. I've been wanting not to say anything about it, as you'll read, but I think it reveals something important in turn. Something about this site, and about the standards to which I intend to hold it.
Think back to the London Olympics. Women's beach volleyball. In the wake of the all-USA gold medal final, and in the long-since confirmed news of Misty May-Treanor's retirement from the sport, came speculation of an eventual partnership between Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross. It's a natural fit, what with Misty's retirement, the fact that April's incumbent partner Jen Kessy will be 39 come Rio and has said that she wants to start a family, while April (turns 31 later this year) has that a bit further on her backburner.
Everyone sort of came to the realization that, yeah, this is probably gonna happen. They couldn't team up immediately, because Jen's career isn't over yet (indeed, it was reported at the time of the last Olympics that she planned to play the 2013 season in full) and because of Kerri's somewhat unexpected pregnancy.
Sometime between then and now it turned into "everybody knows" that this would happen in 2013, not 2014.
Things change. They surely do. Jen recently got married. Maybe she's planning to accelerate the transition into post-professional, private life. I don't know.
You know how I don't know? Because no one's come out and said anything about it.
Earlier today this reached twitter. The account for FIVB's "FIVB Heroes" campaign reported the Walsh Jennings/Ross partnership as being on for 2013. April had this to say:
I don't introduce a screenshot just to be illustrative, I do it because about 5 minutes after she posted this tweet, she took it down. It was simple dumb luck that I still had it open in one tab to screengrab.
If you pull up the tweet posted by FIVB Heroes, you come to this page.
Looks pretty good, right? Attributed to two sources. Gotta be right on the money, doesn't it? One of those sources happened to post on VolleyTalk, a forum I've come to frequent (the other is a podcast where April mentioned that she and Kerri have discussed a partnership). Here's the thread. It's largely self-explanatory, but if you don't wish to click, I'll run it down for you. Cam from Volleyball Source magazine presented the story saying a "very reliable source" had told him the partnership was on for 2013.
I asked what the attribution was. He said his source didn't want to be named.
And that's why you haven't seen me report it.
Simple as that, really. Now, I have nothing personal against Cam or Volleyball Source magazine, nor do I have cause to think they're inventing this out of whole cloth. But I will not run anonymous rumours. If you want chatter and scuttlebutt, you're in the wrong place. Passing on rumours and innuendo that have no substantive attribution (such as FIVB Heroes' twitter has done) grants them a legitimacy they never had in the first place. It's dangerous. I'll not have it on The Net Set.
As I said in the VT thread, I'll consider this official when one of the principals (or perhaps one of their husbands) confirms it. Or when someone like FIVB runs with it. Cam from Volleyball Source magazine, you know, I'm not sure they would lose a damn bit of face if this falls apart or otherwise proves to be inaccurate. Which means I can't place a whole lot of credibility when they run unsourced rumours. And neither do they deserve any credit for 'breaking' the story. It's all here today, gone tomorrow.
That probably comes across more harsh than I mean it. I mean nothing more than what I said in the VolleyTalk thread — this becomes official when one of the principals confirms it.
And so you know — you're more than welcome to hold me to the same standard. But as I hope this illustrates, and as I hope you've gathered as a regular reader, every word I write here is either unambiguously a personal opinion, or it's a documented fact. The gray area between the two I will not tread and do not wish to tread. If that means I'm the last to run with something, as it rather appears I was about the John Speraw hire, then so be it. The flip side of that coin is that I will never — never — run anything that is not verified and accurate.
And if you have some instances where I have, if inadvertently, gone against this precept, I invite you to point them out to me. Not as a "gotcha!" (though if that'd be how it came, that'd be how it came), but so that I may recognize mistakes and learn from them.
Earlier this month, an ignorant and deeply misguided young man named Sam McGaw propagated a vicious rumour about a college football coach, based on nothing more than what someone had said on an anonymous message board ("anonymous message board" being for all intents and purposes a redundancy). He made quite a fool of himself in the following hours, tweeting that he "repeatedly said it was only a rumour." As if that makes a lick of difference. I vented about his deeds on my writing blog. Be forewarned that the post contains a tone I would never dream of using here (that is, very heavy profanity). Here is my post about McGaw.
To me, that's what all anonymous attribution looks like. It looks dopey little Sam McGaw believing what somebody tells him on a message board.
So I'm not gonna trade in stuff like that here. Even when it's something as seemingly harmless as a beach volleyball partnership. Considering the most recent word we've had on it is a denial, it's not official. Yeah, you can interpret April's denial and subsequent removal of the tweet six ways from Sunday, but like I said, that's not why I'm here.
And it never will be.
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