The Prick Carlisle Story & Bill Shea Should Die Column

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By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@Gmail.com
July 21, 2013

For months, I had been planning on revealing the full story of the exclusive report that put the DetroitSportsRag.com on the map in honor of the websight’s™ (“Bonechip” Foster) ten-year anniversary.

Yep, after a decade of silence, I was finally going to divulge the true story of how a site in its infancy stages — run by an insurance appraiser and an attorney scooped — the entire Detroit sports media for one of the most shocking stories in recent times on a tip from a dentist.

But, when the DSR’s March birthday celebration occurred, I was shockingly on a hiatus from updating this space so the story was never told.   And I might never have gotten around to revealing “DSR Deepthroat” if it hadn’t been for events that occurred in the last week.

You see, back in May of 2003, when we broke the news that Pistons coach Rick Carlisle was going to get fired — a good NINE days before it occurred  — we never received credit from the mainstream media.  It was like our report had never existed, even though the same lapdogs who eventually reported the story when Prick got canned spent the week prior refuting his potential dismissal.

So when I was the FIRST one to report that Greater Media was on the verge of challenging 97.1 “The Ticket” with an all “sports” station featuring Drew Lane, Sean Baligian and ESPN Radio, I didn’t expect proper accreditation from “legitimate” news sources.

And I wasn’t disappointed.

But before I delve into the absolute thievery of Crain’s Detroit and the despicable behavior of Eric Lacy from MLive.com regarding the 105.1 story, I will finally fill you in on how we stumbled into the Carlisle firing news.

Now, you have to remember that back in the spring of 2003, the thought of the Pistons firing Rick Carlisle was absolutely preposterous.  The team won 50 games that season and entered the postseason as the #1 seed in the Eastern Conference.

The Pistons then won their first two playoff series to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals not to mention Carlisle was only 12 months removed from being selected as the NBA’s Coach of the Year.

When we posted the report that Carlisle was going to get canned at the end of the postseason, the Pistons were down 2-0 to the New Jersey Nets in the ECF and Carlisle even had an excuse for that disappointment as the team’s best player (Chauncey Billups) was hampered by a leg injury.

The Thursday we posted this insane rumor was a bizarre one.  DSR co-founder Gregg Schultz and I had a lunch meeting at Mr. Joe’s in Southfield with Terry Foster just hours before our source gave us the heads-up about Joe Dumars’ plans.   (Foster was trying to ingratiate himself with the DSR as he had some Ralph Kramden-esque plan to use us to launch a sports version of the Metro Times.)  

As a matter of fact, after getting the Prick tip, I emailed Foster that evening asking if he thought we should post the article.  Yep, I asked Terry Foster for journalistic advice.   Was almost as bad as the time that I suggested to a friend that he use ML Curley as a babysitter.

Minutes after blogging that Carlisle was on his way out of Detroit, the infamous 2003 Draft Lottery took place in which the Pistons ended up with the second pick in the draft and just miles away from Darkopalooza the team got blown out by the Nets to go down 0-3 in the ECF a couple hours later.

Yep.  All of that occurred on the SAME night.  If these events were depicted like this in a movie about a real-life story you would have said it was total bullshit and done for dramatic effect.

Anyway, how did the DSR discover that Carlisle was on the chopping block? Was I working the phones and calling members of the organization in Auburn Hills? Had I hacked Adrian Wojnarowski’s Blackberry? Did Jordan Dumars accidentally leak the info to one of my cousins whom he attended middle school with? (The last one was actually a prevalent conspiracy theory among the local media.)

Nope.  We basically did nothing except answer the phone.  When we first started the DSR our friend Danny Fox didn’t want to write articles but he did want to contribute to the site.  So during the NFL season he would organize our picks against the spread and post them on the DSR.

Except we didn’t make the selections.  Our pets did.  Fox’s cats (Jimmy and Cliff), DSR Senior Legal Counsel Bill Yochim’s dog (Sparky), Schultz’s dog (Rooben) and my beagle (Chili.)

And while our animals weren’t exactly the feline or canine versions of Sam “Ace” Rothstein they also never had to borrow money from Ryan Ermanni’s brother’s wife’s family to pay off a debt.

ANYWAY, Pet’s Picks didn’t end up as Fox’s legacy with the DSR.  It was his connection with a guy we will call JB for the purpose of this David Aardsma.   Ya see, JB was an acquaintance of one of the Pistons GM’s business partners at the Joe Dumars Fieldhouse in Shelby Township.

And Dumars had informed this partner that he was getting rid of Carlisle and it had very little to do with basketball.  There was speculation that Prick had thrown a vase or potted plant at a secretary.  There were rumors that Carlisle went on a tirade and berated the ticket sales department when they decided to start selling playoff tickets before the team had clinched a berth.

The story we were told was that Carlisle was a major league asshole and owner Bill Davidson wasn’t going to tolerate a humungous douche bag coaching his most prized possession.  I’d like to think Carlisle lost his job because he insisted on playing Michael Curry over Tayshaun Prince, but I am pretty sure it had as much or more to do with Carlisle’s immense need for a Dale Carnegie course.

So that is how we found out about the impending dismissal.  Dumars told his business associate.  The Fieldhouse owner told JB.  JB informed Danny Fox and the DDS apprised Gregg and me of the situation.

It was like Contagion without Gwyneth Paltrow cheating on Matt Damon during a layover in Chicago and ya know, all of the dead Asians.

So that was our big scoop.  Dumb fucking luck and happenstance.   And by Friday evening we were getting requests from sports talk radio stations to discuss our crazy report.

(I was picked to handle the interview requests by process of elimination since Schultz is now 45-years old and is still petrified to call Hungry Howies and order his children a garlic crust pizza.)

On Saturday afternoon I appeared on AM-1270 with Mike Lodish (a poor man’s Marc Spindler if you can believe it) and “Benedict Ann Arbor” Douglas Allen Karsch the Third.   Here is the “Muppet Man” Jeff Riger’s summary of that conversation via email we were able to get our hands on.

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By that evening then Pistons announcer Fred McLeod was doing a live remote from the Meadowlands before Game 4 for WDIV and actually brought up the rumor and then trashed it as coming from an unreliable source.   McLeod basically mocked any suggestion that Carlisle’s job was in jeopardy.

By Sunday evening Dumars had granted Bob Wojnowski an interview for the Detroit News in which the Pistons exec refuted our story without reservation.

So for five days we were a laughingstock.  Until the following Saturday morning when it was announced that the team had parted ways with Prick.  And even after all of the ridicule we received that week and then earning total vindication the Chris McCoskys and Perry Farrells of the world still REFUSED to properly credit the DSR.   They actually were defiant about it.

In fact, the only media source that would acknowledge that this site broke the  news was AM-1270.  The morning that Carlisle got axed I was a guest on the station with Gregg Henson and Gary Danielson in which Henson allowed me to take a victory lap while Danielson labeled me the biggest self-promoter in the city.

And Henson’s involvement is a perfect segue to the second portion of this story.

Like, we didn’t get credit for exclusively reporting the out-of-nowhere firing of a Pistons head coach so we were conditioned pretty early on to never expect the local media to give us proper attribution.  And after ten years I don’t even care anymore.  But I will not sit idly by while my material gets robbed by thieving scribes.   Which is what occurred earlier this week.

So, as any regular reader of this site knows, the DSR broke the story on July 1st that Greater Media would be getting into the FM sports talk business centered around the talents of former WRIF ratings superstar Drew Lane.

Both Henson and I have been working this story for weeks and we each have added different pieces to the puzzle over time.  I usually don’t discuss sources, but for this story I talked to people at Greater Media, ex-employees at ESPN1090, a person very close to Lane and other people DIRECTLY involved in the new station.  Henson had other sources and between the two of us we cracked this thing wide open.

And then on Sunday July 14th (a full 13 days after the DSR report) this plagiarizing criminal Bill Shea from Crain’s Detroit totally ripped off all of the hard work that Henson and I had done.

Well, you might think that Shea wasn’t aware of the DSR’s report.  He was independently working this story and had no clue that this was already old news by the time he got around to it.

Well, check out the following Twitter exchange we had on July 1st …..

Yeah. Pretty sure this slob shitbag knew about MY story.   But it gets worse.  WAY worse.  The only reason I knew who this crook was in the first place is that he wrote a garbage blog about me back in February of 2012.

Take a look at some of his quotes from that [Scherzer] awful piece which was rambling, disjointed and mainly about the career nobody who penned it.

It’s also not just mindless crap-slinging by an armchair quarterback. There’s been some insightful stuff on DSR. Moss has made points about the Detroit Tigers recently that didn’t occur to me (not much of a feat, to be honest). It also has broken news before the mainstream media, such as the 2003 firing of Detroit Pistons coach Rick Carlisle.

After breaking the Carlisle firing news in 2003, the site made its next splash the following year when it reported that then-Detroit News columnist Rob Parker had taken a loan from the Pistons‘Joe Dumars to finance a book collection of Parker’s columns.

“It has also broken news before the mainstream media.” Right. Like in this particular instance where you sampled my shit without mentioning it in the liner notes.

How bad was this grand larceny by Shea of my story and Henson’s? Well, I had TWO SOURCES from my original story call ME after the Shea article broke asking me what the fuck this guy was trying to pull.   They were incredulous that a supposed journalist would steal someone else’s material so blatantly and then not give the source proper credit.   Both also swore up and down that they never spoke to this moron who has spent a career in journalism only to get to the prestigious job of working for a trade publication.

Which I am guessing in the media world is somewhere between writing for the Daily Shopper and the Jewish News.   This career trajectory coming from someone who claims Hunter S. Thompson is his idol.  Umm, Bill, by the time Thompson was your age, he had already written Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

If HST was writing for a trade magazine at the age of 39, I am guessing he would have offed himself a good 28 years before he did.

After both my readers and I attacked this bunko artist on Twitter for biting my material, Shea attempted to respond to the attacks and it made for some classic material.  Here are just a few highlights:

This Tweet is great because Shea was attempting to tell his followers that I have no credibility and that is why he didn’t credit the site. The original Tweet is from JumPete who QUOTED Shea’s article about me. Like, in his OWN words he was saying that I was a valued source, but yet this wasn’t EXCLUSIVE information.  What the fuck was I supposed to do? Take my blog to the U.S. Patent Office?

This imbecile doesn’t trust my blog. He just wrote a glowing article about it a little over a year ago and spent months as a member of my Facebook Forums until we ran the moron off the site.  Yes, I basically banned the loser because he was so FUCKING AWFUL. The members of the DSR Forums couldn’t agree that it was hot and humid this week yet EVERYONE uniformly agreed that this Shea character was a third-trimester abortion. Hey SHITBAG, remember when I called ya up and told YOU I wanted to write a blog about your awful blog? Right. That never happened. You called ME. And here is another gem from the Cleveland native. (Like has anything good EVER come out of that city?)

I mean,  this “journalist” wrote an article about me in February of 2012. Ummm, I have been wishing death on Fredo Ford, Sr. and Jim Leyland since at least 2005.  Nice background work, BILL. I mean, Sarah Palin was vetted more thoroughly by A.B. Calvahouse back in 2008. I could go on and on posting Tweets that make him look like a jackass, but what is the point? Well, I do want to share one more. After DSR Nation rabidly attacked him on Twitter, Shea tried to make his story more credible by Tweeting about an interview he had with ESPN regarding 1090 no longer carrying the Mothership’s syndication signal.

He Tweeted that on July 15th. On July 12th, ESPN1090’s OWN FACEBOOK PAGE had broken the news that they no longer were affiliated with ESPN and were now a part of the NBC Sports Radio family. Like, who are you trying to fool, douchebag?

And as bad as Shea’s behavior was it almost pales in comparison to Eric Lacy who works for MLive.com.  Now, I have considered Lacy a friend of the site and have had many Facebook conversations with the former Detroit News writer.  He actually seems like a good guy, but boy did this dude fuck me in the ass like a stranger on this deal.

In an article published on July 15th(!!!!), Lacy mentioned the speculation of a new FM sports station.   In Lacy’s post at least he mentioned Henson even though he brought up Shea’s piece.  Still, no mention of Poor Jiff Myst. Why did this anger me? Well, let’s look at this Private Facebook Message between Lacy and myself from June 28th and that continues on the day he posted his story.

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As you can see, the dude was asking me about the Drew and Mike rumor a good 17 days BEFORE his MLive article.  (Henson and I learned from separate sources later that Mike Clark wasn’t part of the plan.) And then just HOURS after his article was uploaded the guy sent me a message saying ….

“good job on this station stuff u will break it before anyone else does”

Well, yeah, probably, I just will do so in anonymity because you people are so terrified of the DSR that you can’t even mention my name!!!! I mean, even media members who I don’t bash like a piñata treat me like this.  Hell, John Niyo even compared me to the villain in Harry Potter for Christ’s sake.

So what was Lacy’s excuse after admittedly learning about the Greater Media stuff from me and then failing to mention that little nugget in his story?????

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He didn’t know if he could credit the original source of the story.  Nice journalism practices you got over there.  Like, Deadspin has ruined ESPN employee marriages and their stories have ended employment at the Worldwide Sports Leader.

But when Deadspin broke the Manti Te’o/Lennay Kekua story did ESPN decide to credit NBC News because Bristol didn’t want to bring attention to a site that destroys ESPN on a daily basis? Of course not.

And it’s not like MLive had a problem mentioning the DSR when I wrote a glowing “obituary” about their beloved Lions beat writer Tom Kowalski.

Fuck, Henson and I both have been reporting this story independently and have had no problem giving each other credit when it was warranted.  And I am an insurance adjuster and he is in the radio business.  I guess to understand proper journalistic etiquette a prerequisite is not being an actual journalist.

Not to mention the two of us don’t even like each other.  We once got into a Twitter War in which I called his wife ugly and mocked him for running a Jungle Java into the ground and he retaliated by posting about a 20-year old rumor about my mom having an affair with Schultz’s dad.

Yet after all of that we could put our petty differences to the side and act like adults when giving proper accreditation for this story.

But that Joe Biden/Dane Cook/Lynn Hopps/Carlos Mencia/Jayson Blair/Jonah Lehrer wannabe who writes for Crain’s Detroit didn’t have that sort of decency.

Oh well.  It isn’t like Shea mentioning the site on Crain’s would have gained the DirtSpurt any more notoriety anyway.  When that career nothing wrote his atrocious blog about the site I think more people found out about HIM than ME through my network of readers.

If Shea wants to continue to idolize Hunter S. Thompson and utilize a pic of HST holding a gun as his Facebook panorama background then shouldn’t the hack have to go all the way and emulate Thompson in the highest fashion possible?

You know, a suicidal self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head?

Don’t worry Bill ….  Justin Spiro, Michael Bochenek, Johnny Depp and I will show up at your home in Hazel Park exactly six months from the date of your death and load your ashes into a cannon and shoot them sky high while we blast “Spirt in the Sky” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” on a boombox.