Gary Shelton can’t be stopped

This is probably a stupid thing to do, calling out a longtime sports writer for the St. Petersburg Times. Especially considering that I’m an unemployed journalist of no notable accomplishment who lives in St. Petersburg.

But what the heck.

You see, I’ve long found Gary Shelton’s ledes thoroughly maddening. So much so, that I was heartened to find a kindred spirit in one of the profs at  USF St. Pete’s J-school, where I earned my master’s degree. When I brought Shelton up, he admitted he had long since given up reading him.

Alas, I cannot.

For those unfamiliar with the term, the “lede” is the first sentence or two of an article. In hard news stories, it’s designed to answer the who, what, where, when, why and how. When writing features, as Shelton does, authors are allowed more literary license to draw readers in. For Shelton, it’s a license to kill the desire to read any further.

Take this sampling of some recent Shelton ledes:

If you are a numbers guy, this might be all you need to know about Pat Burrell.

There is nothing new about the outcry. You have heard the frustration before.
Hear the teeth gnashing of the frustrated fan? Hear the dissatisfaction that comes with underachievement? Hear the howls of outrage directed toward the coach?
Why, if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear it was 2001 all over again.
Seven years later and we have ourselves an echo.

At the time of his hiring a year ago, he couldn’t have seemed more anonymous – a career assistant coach, nothing gimmicky about his plans, even the plainest of names.

Time was, his visor would have been airborne. Time was, his veins would have bulged as if golf club shafts were imbedded in his neck.

On a franchise running in place, they have always been the last great hope. On a team filled with flaws, they have always been the final reason to believe. No matter what else was going on – the struggles on offense or the troubles on special teams or the friction in the front office – they were the players you trusted. For a dozen years, it has been that way. No matter what else went wrong, the defenders of the Tampa Bay Bucs could be counted on to make most of it right.

And the first two grafs from today’s column, which is such classic Shelton, it inspired me to finally write this post:

The noise in the distance sounds familiar. Perhaps you have heard it before.
At first, it sounds like the rumble of thunder in the distance. Listen more closely, and it is more like the snapping of teeth and the popping of pads. It is the sound of trouble brewing, and in its wake, you can hear the whimpering sounds of disappointment.

Nearly common to all is the pronoun as subject: You. They. He. This. It. All in the service of Shelton’s slow burn, as he doesn’t explicitly reveal the subject of his column until the second, third, sometimes fourth graf.

Along the way, he tries to build tension with hyper-dramatic imagery: “teeth gnashing,” “veins bulging,” “the rumble of thunder,” “the last great hope.” Occasionally, perhaps caught up in the narrative dance of his own design, Shelton gets lazy, offering up the weak “sound of trouble brewing” and “whimpering sounds of disappointment” in the same sentence. But even when his descriptions are stark and ominous, the payoff rarely justifies the elaborate, teasing and ultimately tiring set-up.

Which makes me wonder if Shelton’s editors are oblivious to his template or if they simply don’t care, because he has been the big cheese in the Times sports department for nearly two decades.

Or maybe, like me, they continue to be fascinated and amused by Shelton’s repeated visits to the well and don’t want to ruin a good chuckle.

One last thing: This sentence from today’s column is grammatically incorrect:

Yes, they have a different coach now than back in January 2001, when they won the last Super Bowl played in Tampa Bay.

Things are different “from” other things, not different “than.” It’s a common mistake. In a rewrite, I would have made it: “Yes, they have a different coach from the Ravens of January 2001, when they won the last Super Bowl played in Tampa.”

But who needs editors?