Re: any NHL Hockey fans on here
Pat Burns, and the day Twitter went wild
Reported ‘death’ of former NHL coach eventually debunked
VANCOUVER — Pat Burns didn't die Friday, which was good for him, no doubt, but a tough break for all the people who reported that he had.
Damned inconsiderate of him, when you think about it.
Various timelines have now been forensically analyzed to determine Ground Zero of the erroneous rumour — a National Post probe initially pinned it on CTV Ottawa and our own Team 1040, citing poor Ray Ferraro as the source — but the Toronto Star's Damien Cox has since stepped forward to claim an honest mistake, based on information given to him by Maple Leafs senior executive Cliff Fletcher, a close friend of Burns.
Ferraro apologized anyway, profusely, on the air for relaying bad information to listeners, but if everyone who passed it along on Twitter were to apologize, the sheer volume might crash the site.
Happily, Burns, the 58-year-old longtime National Hockey League coach of the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins and New Jersey Devils, who has fought a long, stubborn battle against three different strains of cancer, called TSN's Bob McKenzie about an hour into the Friday morning feeding frenzy to assure him he was very much alive — and evidently cantankerous as ever.
“Here we go again,” Burns said. “I come to Quebec to spend some time with my family and they say I'm dead. I'm not dead, far f-----g from it. They've had me dead since June.”
McKenzie not only gladly set the record straight, but wrote a wonderfully touching piece about Burns on the TSN website (you can read it here) and within an hour, all that remained of the embarrassing incident was a bunch of media pointing their bitter Twitter fingers, mostly at the unlucky Cox, and saying, “I didn't start it. He did.”
Anyway, the really remarkable thing isn't who lit the fire, but how quickly it spread on this Babe Ruth of social media, as contributors leaped in with both feet to be among the first to retweet the retweets and add a personal note of sadness.
Not too long a note, mind you, just 140 characters or fewer.
What a way to go.
A phone call to the family to verify the news might have halted the wildfire earlier, but no one made that call because the important thing was to get it on Twitter first, and worry about whether it was accurate later.
“What a proud day for Twitter journalism. People tripping over themselves to be first to report a man's death,” wrote ESPN's Scott Burnside. On Twitter.
The day was not without humour. After McKenze's piece appeared on TSN's site, a number of people, including me, raved about it on Twitter. “Best piece ever, Hoser,” I wrote. (Hoser is McKenzie's nickname, courtesy of SCTV's old Doug and Bob McKenzie skits. Don't tell him I told you.)
This prompted a response from wisecracking San Francisco columnist Ray Ratto.
“No it isn't,” Ratto, an old buddy, tweeted me, in a direct message. “Burns called me 10 minutes ago and said, 'Yes, I am dead. McKenzie screwed it up.' ”
As a guy who's made more than the odd mistake in print, some of them beauties, I'm no glass-house resident tossing boulders. Nor is this a defence of mainstream media versus the onslaught of bloggers and Twitterites, especially now that I'm one of them. This particular rumour, after all, appears to have been an MSM production, at least initially.
File this column under Nostalgia, then.
Once, back in the dawn of time, probably the 1960s, legendary New York sports columnist Red Smith described the arduous grind of churning out his daily 1,000 words, which back in the day required coming up with an idea, researching it, then crafting it.
“There's nothing to writing,” Smith said. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
If he were alive today, he might have to revise.
“There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a laptop and open a Twitter account.”
Twenty-five words later, you're done.
Remind me never to die on Twitter. Awfully glad Pat Burns didn't.
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/Burns+Twitter+went+wild/3541882/story.html#ixzz0zpp09400
I'd love to go watch them play but I think the games were sold out already somewhere in the spring, at least that's how it was when NHL team played here last time. I hope this isn't he last time so I'll have the opportunity to go there some other year.
