[SportsRadio 610] Lance Zierlein Badmouthing Clutchfans

I think the first few responses to the thread summed it up best.

I apologize up front that this will be a long, long post. There is so much here to explain and tell. It made good sense to keep that all to myself before, but if Mr. Z keeps poking the stick, I probably need to tell everything.

I/the site have a long history with Lance, and to my recollection, it's all been positive (up to now). However, at some point last month, a bug, the size of which would have the Orkin man begging for a quick and painless death, has crawled up his ass about the site, and I now believe he has completely different motives for doing what he's doing. Over and over and over, all I keep hearing from him is how terrible this is, and on and on and on and on.

So let me give you the entire background of why grr-grr Lance is in such a rage:

sjackson0 posted in late February an experience he had with a player over All-Star weekend, and shared a <a href="http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=109179">"rumor"</a> he heard from that player about why T-Mac was so down. He made it emphatically clear that this was just the buzz -- the player didn't know for sure if it was true. sjackson0 even named the player he spoke with. I was surfing the board at the time and saw the thread almost immediately after it was posted. I did not remove it. The only change I made to it was removing the name of the player he spoke with. I posted that I had no idea if this was true or not.

A couple of days later, Tracy's mother-in-law passed away. Lance sent me an unsolicited email expressing how "surprised and disappointed" he was in me for, basically, allowing this rumor to be born/spread/fester. I sent a very brief email back -- just two words: "Thanks, Dad".

Shortly after that, I got a call from someone important -- it was very nice, very professional. It explained the situation well and asked as a favor if this could be taken care of, since it wasn't accurate. Given that the rumor was then false, I was of course fine with that. I posted an explanation, labeled it "FALSE" and locked the thread. In my opinion, it was handled exactly as it should have been.

The end result: The post was on the site for almost 3 days before the "rumor" was confirmed to be false. That's not to say sjackson0's story was false, but that the rumor he heard from the player was.

Despite the fact that he knew the thread was locked and pronounced "FALSE", it wasn't good enough for Lance. He comes back with an email, spouting off about his big plans (and again, this is after I posted that the rumor was false) to cover this. He started to speak for a high-up Rocket executive, telling me how angry he is with it (guess who called him to first inform him about it?). He tells me "damage control needs to be done" and as such, he is going to talk to Tracy about this, which he did do (guess who called Tracy to first inform him about it?). He tells me that I and/or sjackson0 will come on his show that Monday to discuss the "validity of whether or not a rumor should be allowed to run wild on a message board when it pertains to someones personal life".

I told him I would be happy to discuss it with him ... on the board. I wasn't going to get a fair fight talking to an audience that has no clue what happened on a show hosted by a couple of voice hacks with an agenda out to make a webmaster look like a jackass after a player's family member just passed away.

I also made this crystal clear to him: What you are reading this on is a message board. It is not a publication and the things posted here are not "reported" by me. This is a fan community and people discuss things here as they would hanging out with other fans. We have always done a bang-up job keeping the board clean of vicious personal attacks, baseless speculation and known falsehoods.

So how did this thread make it through? If this very post had come out of the blue randomly, say about Juwan Howard, yes -- I probably would have deleted it. However, don't forget what the McGrady situation was like around the All-Star break -- it was a 'perfect storm' of speculation and rumor, and that was not created by ClutchFans. This was fueled by an information void created by Tracy and the Rockets and a rush of NBA players/agents/fans coming into Houston for All-Star weekend, hitting the night spots and talking, talking, talking. EVERYONE wanted to know what was wrong with T-Mac (the TNT crew was blasting at him for it), and remember, he said, "I've dealt with family members passing away, best friends getting killed. This is a lot worse than that because it's a combination of things in different areas. I'm in a tough stage of my life right now."

Are you telling me that the fans' minds weren't racing with, "What could possibly be worse than family members passing away and/or getting killed?" as game after game they're watching Tracy play more like Ullman than McGrady?

Someone else told me this, and I agree wholeheartedly: If it's posted, and it names a knowledgeable source, and it fills an explanatory void (re McGrady's behavior) that he and the Rockets have bizarrely created, and he and the Rockets say nothing for days, what basis do I have acting solo to axe the thread? I have to know it's false to bury it and sjackson0 did not say it was anything more than it was. And if the message board has the kind of impact that Lance attributes to it, then you can be damn sure it behooves the Rockets to get someone to follow it and respond -- to give information and prevent misinformation. When that did happen -- even if it took 3 days (a time period in which I never heard a single dissenting voice from Lance) -- I fulfilled my responsibility.

But still, the "message board" aspect of the site is beyond his mental grasp: Thursday morning he equated the message board "rumor" thread, which practically begged people to ingest it with a heavy dosage of salt, to a published article in a newspaper. BRILLIANT! We are all "idiots" Lance and bow before your true genius. Great job.

My only regrets about this: I did not pay enough attention to the thread later, because if I had I would have cleaned up some of the childish posts that followed down the line. Also, I would have worked toward a "false" conclusion sooner. But looking back, if the exact same thing happened in the exact same situation, I would have done the same thing. And to those who disagree with that and/or agree with Lance -- I'm fine with that. I can take a healthy discussion about it with the goal towards keeping the BBS as great as possible for everyone, and if I'm ultimately wrong, then I'll do better next time.

But I've been running the BBS for over 8 years and we've had some incredible and unique posts on here. Don't come at me like Lance with both guns blazing, pointing fingers without the slightest bit of knowledge of how a message board works.

And if you want my honest opinion, I think Lance has much, much more to answer for ethics-wise than I do. I allowed the post, but I squashed it and left it for dead once it was able to be resolved. On the other hand, while Lance was blasting the message board moderator for tolerating such a rumor -- he was using it, disguised as a moral question about the rumor, to boost ratings at 610 at a great cost to the player's privacy well after it was terminated at the very source where it began (Do his listeners even know that this thread was solved and closed well before Lance even mentioned it on the air???). He also used the rumor to boost his standing with the players by coming off as the great guardian of their privacy -- and at the same time, he was actively recruiting someone to appear on his radio show whose sole qualification to be on was posting the offensive rumor in the first place.

Do not for one minute think Lance was doing this for anyone but himself. He saw an opportunity, and he pounced. He took this flame, dropped a Hindenburg-sized canister of gasoline on it, sent the bill to the 610 sponsors, and now he wants me to account personally for the inferno.

Not on your life. You know, if the Rockets organization has a problem with a post, I'd like to hear their thoughts. If Sports Radio 610 has a problem with a post, they can get with Chance and write a catchy tune about it. It means diddly squat to me.

But alas, something tells me that this is not the last episode we will see of Lance Zeirlein: Message Board Warrior.