Savage Words: ‘Command-All, Delete,’ happened to me last week

There’s nothing worse for a sportswriter than ‘Command-All, Delete.’

It’s happened to me a few times. It occurs more than you’d think when it comes to daily newspapers, or a 24-hour news source, like the Associated Press.

I’ve been fortunate to write for the Associated Press over the past several years from time-to-time. Whenever there are nationally ranked men’s or women’s college basketball teams playing at the Sanford Pentagon or Denny Sanford Premier Center, the AP hires me to cover the games.

But it comes with some anxiety as well. Unlike a weekly paper like the Journal, you’re up against it when it comes to deadlines. When the game is over, the AP wants the story RIGHT NOW. The rule for the AP is the first 300 words need to be sent in within a few minutes of the final buzzer. There’s a chance to go back and rework the story with quotes later, but when the final horn sounds, you’d better have your (expletive) together.

If you don’t, you get a call from New York City from some angry editor who is looking for your 300-word copy.

It was the same when I worked for the daily newspaper in Sioux Falls. As the years went on, those deadlines crept closer and closer to 10 p.m., and a basketball or football 7 p.m. start left very little time to crank out a 700-word story in time. Again, I was on the receiving end of more than one call from an editor in downtown Sioux Falls, begging me for my copy. 

It can be stressful.

Many times at the daily newspaper, and oftentimes with the AP, I’d write ahead, assuming I could predict the outcome of the game. If I got it right, it really, really helped when it came deadline time. If the game was a blowout, you can usually write 80 percent of the story before the final buzzer sounds.

It’s extraordinarily tough when it’s a tight game, when basketball teams are trading game-leading buckets in the final minutes and the outcome is in the balance. You end up writing two ledes, or an opening sentence or paragraph. It serves to summarize the most important aspects of the story and grab the reader’s attention.

Trust me, when you’ve got two ledes going, and the game is up-and-down at a frantic pace, with the crowd roaring, and the energy in the building at warp speed, it can fray your nerves. You gotta get the story written in a short amount of time, and there’s a lot going on.

So again, sometimes I cheat a little when it looks like the game is out of hand. I write as much as I can, to get ahead of the pending tight deadline.

However, that approach can also bite you in the shorts, and it happened to me last Friday at Sioux Falls Stadium watching the Lynx play Bishop O’Gorman in the state quarterfinals.

I wasn’t under a lot of time pressure, because again, a weekly paper leaves several days to get a story in, not a few moments.

Sitting in the press box at the Bird Cage last week, the Lynx trailed O’Gorman 6-3 heading into the top of the seventh. The Knights had Brandon Valley covered all night, and it seemed a sure early-round exit for the Lynx. 

So, I wrote the story. Wrote it completely, assuming the final would indeed be 6-3 in favor of O’Gorman. I was simply waiting for the final out, and I was ready to send the story onto the Journal’s server back in Brandon.

With two outs, the Lynx were down to their final strike. I looked down at my laptop and noticed the cursor blinking on the SEND button on the story.

Perhaps senior Ryland Carroll could sense what I was up to. No doubt he had more on his mind, eyeballing O’Gorman pitcher Jackson Bjorkman, down to his final strike. But, I grinned as I looked down at my cursor, sort of just daring me to hit SEND on the story I’d already written.

Moments later, Carroll uncorked a two-run double to tie it at 6-6. I then happily did the ‘Select-All, Delete’ on my computer and rewrote the entire story, which actually wasn’t completed until Saturday night as the Lynx went on to defeat Sioux Falls Lincoln in the semis and Sioux Falls Jefferson in the championship game.

Obviously, I was happy for coach Jeremy VanHeel and his squad of eventual state champions. Rewriting the story was my pleasure, and Ryland taught me once again to not get ahead of myself when writing a game story.