Lazy Sports Writing Hall of Fame: William Rhoden

I've lost a lot of sleep this weekend staying up late to watch Syracuse games, so I'm only getting to some of the Friday articles in my RSS feeds now. I don't want to let this utterly worthless column by William Rhoden of the New York Times pass without comment though. It's ostensibly about the Syracuse-UConn six-overtime epic on Thursday night, but the actual description of the game is limited to two paragraphs at the very beginning that could've been written after twenty minutes of watching SportsCenter Friday morning.

The vast majority of the article-- seventeen of the twenty paragraphs-- is given over to a detailed recounting of the 1992 Duke-Kentucky game in the NCAA tournament, the one with the last-minute Christian Laettner shot. Why is this in this weekend's paper? Apparently because Rhoden had dinner with Grant Hill's parents on Thursday, dozed off before the end of the Syracuse game, and decided to dust off some copy from seventeen years ago rather than take the time to write something new.

What a ridiculous waste of space.

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