Coupeville Sports

“Wedgies for all!!”

I come not to bury Jim Waller, but to praise him.

Let’s be really clear here. I have no personal animosity towards the current Sports Editor of the Whidbey News-Times.

He was my high school journalism teacher during my semester at Oak Harbor High School, and, though I’m sure I drove him to distraction like many editors yet to come, he is the primary reason I made it through the front door of professional journalism in the first place.

When the News-Times was looking for a high school writer and a photographer to cover a story (Oak Harbor vs. Shelton in boys’ basketball) while Brian Zylstra, the Sports Editor at the time, went to a company Christmas party, they turned to Waller and he gave them two names.

My story ran, the photos (for whatever reason) did not, and I was off on a 23-year-and-counting run of chafing upper management. Somewhere, the 1989 version of Kasia Pierzga just got a chill and screamed “We have to take him out now! Before the headaches begin!!”

Mr. Waller could have given the gig to several other students who had been in his journalism program longer. He didn’t have to choose me, but he did. He made me a “made” man (well, boy…) in the biz.

And now, it seems, I trash him on a regular basis. Or, at least that’s how some people regard it.

Again, let’s be painfully clear here.

I am a huge fan of Mr. Waller.

I am not a fan of the Canadian Corporate Overlords who have oozed their way across Whidbey Island, buying up all three of our newspapers and attempting to put a stranglehold on the media outlets. They are what they are, a giant Evil Empire, and I am the Rebel Alliance in this fantasy.

There were good people inside some of those Storm Trooper outfits, guys just trying to make a buck for the family. But once you sign away your soul, you become the target.

I haven’t worked inside the Evil Empire since I left the News-Times in 1994, burnt out by too much contact with the corporate news world, so I can’t begin to say I know how and why decisions are made inside those walls.

What I do know is that it is 2012 and not 1922, and when you don’t update your web site for 60+ hours (every weekend) on games that happen RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from your building, you are asking to be paddled, and I am happy to oblige.

When you build your empire on paying freelancers virtually nothing, there comes a day when that business model falls apart. When the urchins rise up and say, “Screw this! I can beat you at your own game and without your cushy retirement packages and free doughnuts in the break room!!”

I don’t wish ill on Mr. Waller or any of the other people who work for the Evil Empire. I know Justin Burnett, Jessie Stensland and Jim Larsen, and they do what they can within the framework of working for a giant, heaving corporate behemoth.

But Sound Publishing and Black Press (the real power behind the loonie-lined throne) are behind the times. WAY behind the times. And if they want to continue to pour their filthy lucre into the News-Times and Examiner, papers that seem dead-set on fanatically clinging to the past, they’re betting on the wrong horse.

Business changes. That’s reality, something I saw firsthand in the video store biz, a once booming world that is virtually extinct now. You change with the times, adopt the new, or you die.

The stream-lined, quicker, more aggressive fighter is coming for the bloated heavyweight champ, and, if you thought my jabs were annoying, wait for the hay-maker.

I am the last of the self-righteous son of a goat lickin’ whores out here, and I ain’t going quietly into that good night. I will rain pain on Canada in the name of independent journalism, like a gnat driving a rhino insane.

And, if that makes some think I have a personal vendetta against Mr. Waller, they’re being short-sighted. And if you think I am unprofessional and need a lesson on class, remember, I didn’t waste four years listening to pretty lectures in a college class, so I probably missed that lesson.

I learned the business on the streets of Whidbey Island, honing my “skills” under tough old pros like Fred Obee, Geoff Newton, Ellen Hiatt, Bill Wilson, Mary Kay “Screw the Bastards!!” Doody and Keven R. “Shoot the bastards with rubber bands!!” Graves. Gretchen Sotomayer was awesome too, but way too nice to be called “tough.”

They are gone now, at different papers and in different professions. Mary Kay has passed, but I fight most of all for her. She would want it that way.

The prodigal son they unleashed is still here and I am going to kick Canada’s ass in their memory.

You thought I was annoying before? Tighten the chin strap, baby, cause the real storm is coming.