Reali and the inside track

Tony Reali, the boyish host of ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” is an enthusiastic proponent of what he calls “inside information.” Reali’s chief responsibility on ATH is to award points to the show’s four talking heads based on the worthiness of their arguments about sports. Allusions to a particularly rare piece of info always make him trigger-happy. “Inside information!” he’ll gleefully pronounce at the mention of a behind the scenes conversation, before hammering down on the points button. 

I used to find this scoring quirk gimmicky, as it generally watered the level of conversation down to such enlightening comments as, “I talked to such and such, and he said….” On the other hand, Reali probably instilled in a generation of sports fans an uncanny respect for primary sources. 

Perhaps for this reason, I felt particularly proud of myself when an e-mail exchange with a former Duke professor for a term paper led to some unexpected inside baseball. The ex-prof essentially implicated two big-name administrators in distorting the importance of their roles in planning a groundbreaking project purely to give themselves a national PR boost. If true, the accusations would have cast considerable doubt on the parts of the paper I had already written, in addition to casting doubt on the credibility of the admins themselves. This information went uncorroborated, and may well have been borne out of the aforesaid source’s distaste for Duke. Nevertheless, I temporarily felt privy to an insider’s view of the world, above the bland press releases and politicking stonewallers that would have us believe the company line.  

Most of the time, however, the company line is all we have to work with. You can adamantly argue “We did not structure a portfolio that was designed to lose money” (Goldman on selling its allegedly rigged ABACUS collateralized debt obligation) is a false statement, but have no means of proving it without “inside information.” The same is true for issues we deem inane (Clinton’s “I did not inhale”) and significantly close to home (Homme Hellinga’s, “These things [the verifiability of now controversial research] were talked through very carefully with all the people involved.”) When insiders disagree about the nature of “inside information,” as was the case with Hellinga and his former graduate student, Mary Dwyer, insider info becomes an undefined, floating mass that defies even Tony Reali. 

So when we think we have a leg up on the news-reading public, all we might really have is a badly distorted version of the truth crafted not so much to explain as to justify. On the average-sized college campus, where everyone is more or less one or two degrees removed from each other, this idea seems particularly pertinent. While it’s nearly impossibly to find someone who can tell you the intimate details of the SEC’s case against Goldman, it’s easy to find a friend of a friend on DSG who supposedly is in the know about the Judiciary ruling on the College Republicans. Here, a goal to get on the inside track of every big issue is plausible, albeit not advisable. To become engrossed in the university rumor mill is to acutely overvalue the insider, and undervalue a complete picture of events.

I come away with this one insight from my modest attempts to piece together news and offer a semi-respectable opinion on it over the last few semesters. The story always deserves another day of development, another day for the inside information to conglomerate. Months, days or mere hours after you formulate an opinion, you’ll inevitably stumble across a game-changer: that the point guard cheated on the SATs, that the lab technician failed the lie detector test, that the student government recalled the election, that, yes, Grizzly Adams did have a beard. The terms of agreement between the columnist and the column are always changing, making the formerly infallible diatribe on controversy X about as clean as a John Calipari recruit. 

As a result, truly earning Reali’s insider points should never be as simple as talking to a few sources, doing the relevant research and conjuring up a novel thesis. I’d like to think that our job as writers demands something more: namely, that we’re skeptical about the entire process and have a healthy level of doubt about the finality of our conclusions. 

Indeed, where “Around the Horn” is involved, the last columnist standing on Friday is often the first one out on Monday.