Embarrassing story No. 2: The night I wasn't fired

A tale of making a terrible situation worse ...

The late sportswriter Gary Jones was a jagged old saw when I arrived at the Los Angeles Daily News in 1989.

I have the vaguest memories of him being amused here and there, but mostly I recall him cranky about one thing or another.

During my first few months at the paper, I was reading a random Associated Press story that related to one of Jones’ beats: auto racing, college football or college basketball. I noticed that some similar blocks of text appeared in the AP story and Jones’ recent piece. I checked the time stamp, and the AP story had been published first.

I was no more than 22 years old, maybe still 21. I was a combination of principled and shy. Principled won: I went to our sports editor at the time and pointed out the duplication. Somberly, I was thanked. I don’t know what happened next.

Time went by. Jones retained his perpetual annoyance, interrupted by moments of humanity. On March 4, 1990, Jones was covering the West Coast Conference men’s basketball tournament game when Loyola Marymount star Hank Gathers collapsed from what was revealed to be a heart-muscle disorder (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) and was pronounced dead 100 minutes later. Jones was actually the one who made the 911 call for help. He was a pro’s pro that night covering the nightmare, and the next time we saw him, you could tell he was shaken by it.

Some more time passed, and Jones reverted to his usual self. On another random day, I stumbled upon another incident where Jones had clearly lifted copy from an AP story. I never wanted to be someone to put someone’s career on the line, but again I didn’t want to ignore it — putting aside the fact that I had no reason to believe that the two incidents I discovered were the only two times Jones had plagiarized.¹ I told our sports editor, who was new to the Daily News and bore no allegiance to Jones.