Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Veteran writer forgets a lesson he should have learned long ago

By Laura Berman / The Detroit News

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The newspaper columnist whose most recent bestseller takes place in heaven is now living the journalist's version of hell.

Mitch Albom, who used his newspaper column as a springboard for multimedia celebrity, is having his work investigated by his colleagues at the Free Press.

Generally, newspaper reporters relish investigations, presuming they're about other people. But having Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters sift through your work for flaws is the journalistic equivalent of a prolonged root canal.

The situation is that Mitch described two professional basketball players, former MSU players, cheering at the Spartans' last game, even though they never flew in for the game, as they'd told him they would.

This was wrong, as Albom admitted in a half-hearted apology last Thursday that said he and his editors "got caught in an assumption."

The problem wasn't only that the players didn't attend the Final Four game, but that Albom described specifically what they were wearing and how they acted, before they packed a suitcase or headed to the airport.

Albom filed a column Friday for a section in Sunday's newspaper, when he and, presumably, his editors knew that even Mitch couldn't predict the future.

Or maybe they didn't.

Over the years, Mitch Albom's reputation -- his legend, locally -- has grown to outsize proportions, as he's added careers (radio show host, novelist) with seemingly no limits.

It's surely no accident that Albom's hugely bestselling books are concerned with the ineffable -- the meaning of life, the prospect of immortality -- or that his work is often most inspiring when it celebrates athletes trying to attain the unattainable.

Dave Robinson, the Free Press editor who edited Albom in the 1980s, once described the columnist's work habits to me with a trace of awe: Mitch was, he said, the hardest-working, most perfectionistic writer with whom he'd ever worked, a stickler for facts, for detail.

That was before the ESPN deal, and Morrie and the five people in heaven, the two TV movies, the friendship with Oprah. That was when Mitch was still writing out of his head and heart, a feisty and aggressive reporter, a lyrical writer who could -- and did -- make readers laugh and cry.

In a column last December, writing that he sometimes felt embarrassed by his ambitious forays into playwriting, composing, screenwriting and novel-writing, Albom recalled Maya Angelou's reproving him: "Why would you tell someone to stop trying to fly?" he wrote that she responded, paraphrasing her.

Perhaps, though, he asked the wrong question and so got the wrong answer.

Even a highly gifted writer, ambitious and intent on soaring higher than everyone else, needs a few trusted associates to make sure the wings don't melt as he flies straight toward the sun.

That first Friday in April, filing the column that's landed him in journalistic hell, Mitch Albom made a judgment call that no average, competent reporter would make.

If that's his failure, it's also the fault of the newspaper editors who believed their special star shone so brightly, he wouldn't, couldn't possibly, need a net.

Laura Berman's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Metro. Reach her at (248) 647-7221 or lberman@detnews.com.