Mike Tharp: Bloopers, blunders and bungles

Every newsie worth his salt can talk on and on about his favorite stories. The ones that broke news. Changed policies. Made folks cry. Made 'em laugh. Started conversations.

But we're far less likely to talk about our screw-ups. The stories we missed. The stories we got wrong. The stories we didn't do.

In the interest of full disclosure, here are some of my biggest bloopers, blunders and bungles.

Mike Tharp

As a kid back in Kansas, I'd just gotten my first page-one byline -- "fronted" is what it's called in the business. It was so neat to walk out to the driveway, open up the Topeka Daily Capital and see my name above a story.

It was a profile of the Rev. Roy Hollomon, leader of the Kansas United Dry Forces. Besides banning liquor by the drink, they wanted to cut off booze in airplanes flying over the Wheat State.

I walked into the newsroom feeling kind of cocky.

Then: "Mike!" It was a shouted growl by Pete Petterson, city editor, sent over from Central Casting with a white flattop and parts of two fingers missing off one hand from getting them caught in a printing press.

I sidled over to his desk.

"Think you got a pretty good story here?" I gulped and nodded. "Think a lotta people are gonna read it?" I hoped so.

"Well," he said, and then everyone in the newsroom heard what followed -- probably even some out in the parking lot. "It woulda been a bleeping good story if you hadn't bleeping spelled his bleeping last name wrong every bleeping time!"

Clearly a lesson I never forgot. (And I just triple-checked the spelling of his name.)

Karl Malone is probably the best power forward in the history of basketball. Second all-time leading scorer in the NBA. Took more free throws than anybody in the pro game's record books. I spent one season shadowing the Lakers -- mainly Kobe Bryant, when he had that sexual assault deal in Colorado -- for a celebrity magazine.

During that season Malone was with the Lakers. He got hurt early and didn't come back till March or so. I met him before the season and told him he was one of my favorite players ever. We got along. Then one night after he came back from his injury, he was sitting in front of his corner locker, both feet in tubs of ice, looking like an inverted ebony pyramid with his jersey off -- the best body I've ever seen on an athlete.

After a TV crew wrapped up an interview, I went over and said hello. He smiled and said how ya doin'. Then I asked, "Want me to show you how you can stop falling forward on your free throws?" He looked right at me. Right through me. Then he pointed to the handy, dandy reporter's notebook I held. "You do your thing with that," he said, "and I'll do my thing out there. OK?"

OK. Sir.

(The deal is, I could've helped him stop falling forward with just one little adjustment in his technique. But for some reason he didn't want to hear it from a graying scribe. I lost him as a source.

Here's a story I missed. I spent a month in Somalia and a month in Bosnia during their civil wars. Like other reporters, I kept hearing rumors about Islamic fundamentalists playing a part on both battlefields. And like other reporters, I discounted the reports, attributing them to troop-hungry American generals in Somalia or pro-Serb elements in the Balkans.

But, of course, as we all learned later, Islamic insurgents did fight in both the Horn of Africa and Bosnia -- Saudis, Chechens and others. Had I chased that story, I still may not have gotten it, since a reporter's contact with combatants was limited to avoiding firefights, getting mugged and robbed or driving 100 mph down Sniper's Alley in Sarajevo. But I didn't even go after it.