The strange odyssey of Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock is getting weirder by the day, with bloggers writing obits and lawyers making threats and Whitlock, all the while, doing something he long ago proved incapable of doing: Staying (mostly) quiet.
The lingering question, of course, is whether Whitlock will ever write for the paper again. The Star says yes -- but we won't blame you if you don't believe it.
As Deadspin pointed out yesterday, Whitlock hasn't written for the Star's sports section since May. And while he started dabbling in opining on such non-sports topics as Sarah Palin --
whom Whitlock dubbed "Gal Sharpton," presumably because of her
voluminous hair and fondness of shoulder pads -- his last such column ran
in June.
But he hasn't been totally silent. In late July, he jumped on The Big Lead to throw a match on the flames of reprimand engulfing author Mitch Albom, who'd recently waxed poetic about ethics despite having an obvious aversion to them. The Big Lead story also leg-dropped the newspaper industry at large, raising more questions about Whitlock's employment at the Star.
Things got weirder from there. Former Star and Pitch columnist Greg Hall, on KC Confidential, accused Whitlock of paying Hall to ghostwrite columns -- a claim that Hall couldn't substantiate. But that didn't stop Whitlock and the Star's lawyers from taking it seriously, sending letters to Deadspin demanding they not print Hall's allegations.
Then, yesterday, another KC Confidential blogger penned a preemptive obit for Whitlock's career at the Star, predicting that Whitlock will resign sometime this month. It would mark the end of a long and controversial and terribly amusing run if true -- but the Star's managing editor in charge of sports, Holly Lawton, swears it's not. She told me the same thing she told Deadspin: that Whitlock is on an "extended vacation," wherein he presumably takes naps and Tweets about E and Sloan's relationship on Entourage.
I reached out to Whitlock, too, but he declined to say anything for publication (in his own special way, of course). If he is on vacation, that vacation is more than two months long now, which is quite a while for Whitlock to keep the steam trapped inside his ears.
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@%: He did not tell me to fuck off. He just said one off the wall thing in his no-comment response. I'd say I feel bad about not relaying it to you guys, but it was sort of harried and unreadable, and might have made your heads explode.
"I reached out to Whotlock, too, but he declined to say anything for publication (in his own special way, of course)."
Does that mean he told you to fuck off or something?
Bet he's just winding down the time left on his contract. Wouldn't surprise me if he wanted more money and The Star is trying to figure out how to pay it while laying off and cutting the salaries of the rest of the newsroom, not to mention departments outside of news that actually generate money.
People just stopped caring about his opinion. I don't want to read it if I can tell he is just trying to poke and prod what the general opinion of anything happens to be.
Doesn't he take an extended vacation every year. I just assumed it was his way to avoid writing about baseball.
With all the censorship of comments at the KC Star, the pitch needs to step up and take the lead for online news. People want to air their thoughts, the pitch fulfills that need.
If the star loses jason, they might as well close the doors. Having lost posnanski and then whitlock, zero reason to use the star as a news source.
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