Unfriendly Competition
Wheels spun in Mariotti’s head. Wood had assailed the very drift and ennui that were the topic of tomorrow morning’s column. The sports final deadline was long gone, but it wasn’t too late to add Wood to the late sports final. Mariotti called Chicago. “I’d have been negligent not to do that,” he says. “All I did was top it out as I should and put my spin on it.”
Jackals? Surf the Internet? “The Tribune is starting to get dirty now,” says Mariotti. “This is really escalating.”
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There’s history between Mariotti and Morrissey that might be worth considering. On February 25 Mariotti inaugurated the occasional series “My Sun-Times Day” by describing one of his long days at the Salt Lake City Olympics. He wrote, “3:30 p.m.–Brief down time. Some sports columnists would get a haircut and write about it, or stand in a six-hour line for a beret at a Roots store and write about it. Those columnists should be doing soft features, not covering the Olympics.” Mariotti mentioned no names. Yet we can suppose that Morrissey managed to recognize himself as the author of both the columns Mariotti ridiculed. I would assume he neither forgot nor forgave, but Morrissey tells me not to.
An Ethical Education
Sure enough, Luna and Degorski were charged with murder on Saturday, and the Chicago papers carried their names on Sunday. Despite the case Lampinen makes, I praise them for waiting, but once again the Daily Herald has given us a contrarian way of thinking about things. Which brings me to the other piece of angry E-mail I read last Monday. It was written by a retired Tribune reporter of the old school: “The Tribune…had its clock cleaned Saturday by the Daily Herald and to a lesser degree the Sun-Times. The Herald had names, pictures, rap sheets etc. while the Trib came up empty….Somebody better give the Trib a wakeup call pretty soon.”
