America Will Never Know

Tonight, August 4th, at 8pm, Sun Sports will debut its newest installment of "Under The Lights," our behind-the-scenes series on sports figures and traditions in Florida. The subject is UCF head coach George O'Leary. I've ruminated on this UTL show and coach O'Leary many times in this space; now, a chance to apologize for coming thisclose to potentially submarining his career. Again.

This otherwise unremarkable Friday began with the morning routine: awake to the sounds of my three-year-old yelping for release from her crib. Release Dexter, the mentally challenged Chocolate Lab, into the backyard so that he may begin his strenuous daily schedule of eating, sleeping, and evacuating waste. Hand the Comics over to my six-year-old, who reads them as a hedge fund manager would read the Wall Street Journal. Normal day.

This morning's Orlando Sentinel sports section had a media column from Dave Darling, who devoted his space to a preview of our UTL show tonight. Cool. Skimmed it for errors, of which there were none. Then I noticed this line:

"...according to the show, the team's fall GPA of 2.8 was the highest in the history of Division I-A football." Darling transcribed that, accurately, from the script for "Under the Lights: George O'Leary," which I wrote. I, in turn, found that information on O'Leary's bio page at the UCF Athletics website.

It was his use of the phrase "according to the show" that made me drop my peanut-butter sandwich. Darling clearly found that GPA stat to be quirky, but didn't have the time or resources to explore it. At that moment, after reading Darling's column, a truly awful thought occurred to me: I blew it.

Sprinting to my home office, I re-checked the O'Leary bio page, and sure enough, there it was: "The Golden Knights set a new school [my emphasis] Division I-A history record with a 2.78 team GPA in 2004, only to break that mark with a 2.808 team GPA in the fall of 2005."

SCHOOL record. As in, the football team's GPA of 2.8 in the fall of '05 was the highest it's ever been since UCF went Division I around 1996. Not an NCAA record; not an all-Division I record. A school record.

One thing you have to understand about me, and you can ask anyone I work with here at the Sun Sports studios, anybody I ever worked with at ESPN, Mike Bianchi, Todd Wright, my parents, my wife, and my sixth-grade English teacher: I am flat-out ferocious about research. I may not have Chris Fowler's luxurious head of hair, or Vin Scully's pipes, or Mike Tirico's stunning versatility, but I will...not...be...outworked. That's how it is.

So you can imagine the weight and girth of the stone that lodged in my gut on Friday morning when I realized that despite a half-dozen re-readings of O'Leary's bio page, I had somehow misinterpreted the GPA stat in writing the script for the UTL show, which was, at that moment, on a tape at the Sun Sports master control center in Houston, ready to air statewide to 6.5 million cable homes in Florida at 8pm tonight.

Crap.

Piloted the Accord at Warp 7 to the Sun Sports studios, where I cornered Mike Wargo, our senior editor, the guy who had assembled the O'Leary show. I asked him to show me the final "standup" from the show, wherein I appeared on-camera at the construction site for UCF's new stadium in Orlando and rattled off those stats on academics. Mike, who's been doing this long enough to recognize the panicked tones of a man who screwed up, stifled the urge to strangle me and called up the footage.

The line, as I spoke it, went something like this: "...that's an NCAA Division I record."

Crap again.

In the context of the entire standup, the line could have been interpreted either way - school record as a D-I program, or D-I record. But in the context of a show on George O'Leary, there was no room for interpretation - not when it comes to anything having to do with academic records and/or bio pages. The show could not air as-is.

We had to fix it. And the clock was ticking. 8pm debut, people. Houston.

Mike had several different takes of that final standup from the raw field tapes stored in his server, so we started combing the footage to see if we could apply a digital band-aid. Luckily, there it was - another line, not used in the rough-cut media preview copy of the show that Darling watched, that dealt with scholarship contributions to UCF during O'Leary's tenure. With a little editing magic, the line would perfectly replace the hole left when we cut out the line about team GPA. Before he made the edit, of course, I logged back on to the UCF website and quadruple-checked the dollar figures. Satisfied, I gave him the okay to make the fix.

Start to finish, from tackling Mike in the hallway until the final edit: thirty minutes. I still had a good hour left before my scheduled ritual suicide. After a couple of phone calls and e-mails, we arranged to feed the newly-corrected show via satellite to Master Control in Houston at 1pm, with instructions to take the old copy and throw it into the Gulf of Mexico. Seven hours to spare, an eternity in television. The show you see tonight, and dozens more times throughout August, is accurate.

Just to clarify: this is on me, not on UCF. While I'm stunned that I could blow this after burying myself in O'Leary research for the last few months, the bottom line is the bottom line. It was my script, and my responsibility. The mere thought of my mistake getting on the air, and the potential for media blather if somebody caught it and made the connection between "academic records" and O'Leary - even though the bio page was clearly not his writing - makes me sick to my stomach. Major credit to Dave Darling of the Sentinel, whose journalistic instincts were dead-on. Had that line not caught his ear, and had he not included "according to the show" in his Friday column, I never would have made the catch. And God bless digital editing systems and satellite technology.

As we like to say in television when someone catches an error shortly before air: "America will never know." Well, now you do, even though you'll never see it on TV. Never happened. And you thought TV guys just sat around whitening their teeth all day.

Enjoy the show. The accurate, meticulously researched, gorgeously produced and edited, correct show.