“Broadsheet Bully” Ron Borges learned that you can’t smash the ironclad pigskin portcullis of Cold, Hard Football Facts with a rickety, transparent agenda for a battering ram.

 

Borges quietly retired from the Boston Globe Friday, to “pursue new projects in sports journalism.” The news was met with unabashed glee by football fans in New England (as evidenced by the unmistakable reactions on various message boards, such as here and here and even here in the Globe).

 

When Borges wasn't bullying his enemies, he was playing the part of journalistic jester, dragging the Boston Globe sports section through the muddy moat of illegitimacy over the past several years with his in-print and on-the-air antics. While the paper’s reputation unraveled, Globe execs looked down their noses from their golden thrones and defended Borges as one of the best football writers in the country.

           

The gap between public perception (total hack) and his employer’s publicly stated perception (one of the best) could not have been greater.

           

Yet here’s how it ends for Borges and the Globe: just two weeks after returning from a two-month suspension for what Globe editor Martin Baron called “plagiarism,” the paper slipped in an announcement of the writer’s retirement through a meager five-sentence announcement posted online late Friday afternoon. It’s not exactly a send-off befitting one of the nation's "best" sports writers. Maybe he'll get the gold watch in the mail.

           

As sports media blogger David Scott put it, something smells “fishy” about the whole deal. It seems to us that the Globe was, finally, fed up with the negative publicity and the tarnish Borges brought to what was once the nation’s brightest sports section.

 

Of course, the Cold, Hard Football Facts played a little role in the event, with a series of fact-filled stories about Borges that culminated in March when we broke the news that he had lifted a column from another newspaper (several other suspicious passages from his history were later reported by a variety of outlets, including one labeled "plagiarism" by the Poynter Institute. But, for whatever reason, these other passages generated no buzz). It’s the story that ultimately led to his suspension and then departure from one of the cushiest gigs in all of sports writing: football columnist at a big-city daily covering one of the most dominant franchises in NFL history. As my dear mom used to say when the kids did something stupid: "you could screw up a free meal."

 

But the story of how we got involved in BullyGate deserves to be told. For it represents the triumph of a once-voiceless public over the Ivory Tower, big-media establishment which, for years, treated its readers like ignorant, teeming, dirt-faced peasants

 

Somewhere along the way, the Cold, Hard Football Facts developed an “anti-Borges” reputation.

 

As we’ve said here online in and various interviews, it’s not a reputation we sought. It simply came to us from outside in the cold distance, where a wild hack did howl, as we and our readers surveyed the football media from our watchtower of truth.

 

We have no agenda against Borges. We never did. Few of us ever met him. We have no reason to dislike him. We take no joy in his departure and wish he hadn’t put himself in this predicament.

 

But we do have a responsibility to our readers – the same responsibility the Globe, for whatever reason, chose to ignore as it lost readers and hemorrhaged money.

Displeased consumers had long complained to the Globe about what they felt was the sub-standard reporting that routinely appeared below the Borges byline. Scores of readers, if not hundreds of them, wrote to us saying they would cancel, or had cancelled, their Globe subscriptions because of Borges. We can only imagine the number of cancellation notices sent to the paper itself. But the Globe simply brushed off these complaints like so many little gnats, showing the utter contempt it felt for the doctors, lawyers, plumbers, students, soccer moms, struggling families and, yes, sports fans, who the paper alleges to serve.

 

So we became one of the primary sources people turned to when they wanted to express their displeasure with this reporter (the other source was BostonSportsMedia which, as an older outlet than CHFF and one devoted to Boston and to media, had chronicled Borges’ transgressions longer and in much greater detail than we have).

 

Maybe people knew we had the cojones to take on a bully, even one hiding behind a highly amplified pigskin pulpit. After all, we back down from no pigskin opponent; they back down from us.

 

Or maybe folks knew we had the knowledge, the research, the data, the Cold, Hard Football Facts, to shoot down the ridiculous, factless pigskin pabulum that filled his copy. After all, Borges, wielding nothing but a razor-sharp agenda, was obviously overwhelmed when faced by a phalanx of Cold, Hard Football Facts.

 

Whatever the reason, emails about Borges poured into us almost since the day we launched the site back in September 2004 – to the tune of well over 1,000 emails about Borges alone in the past 30-plus months since we’ve been around (and, yes, we’re happy to share the emails with anyone who doubts us, as we did with Boston Magazine when it contacted us for its ridiculous story that attempted to paint a rosy portrait of Borges while smearing the Cold, Hard Football Facts; another victory for us). For those of you keeping score at home, that’s better than one email per day, every day, since the launch of this site, all complaining about a single reporter’s obvious agenda.

 

And, this needs to be stated very, very clearly, so as not to be misconstrued (Friends of Ron, pay attention): consumers were not upset because Borges offered “controversial,” “contrarian” or "unpopular" opinions. Virtually everyone we heard from respected his right to be controversial.

 

No, the biggest complaint we heard was that Borges offered:

It all boiled down to ethics.

 

The people we heard from demanded higher journalistic standards. They demanded standards befitting one of the nation's largest and most powerful newspapers. They were grossly disappointed by the quality of the work they saw. They believed they were witnessing an abuse of power, a guy who used his bully pulpit to routinely attack people he did not like (namely, Bill Belichick, the "glorified gym teacher"). Simple as that.

 

So we had no agenda. We never went out of our way to find errors in his copy. We did not sit around all day, as some have suggested, searching through everything Borges ever wrote to find things to complain about.

 

Nope, we never did any of this. Never even thought of it. We didn’t have to. An army of incredulous readers did it for us. When they found the gross errors and the obvious agendas that popped up in his copy like gophers in Caddyshack, they made sure we knew about it.

 

By reporting on Borges, we were simply doing what the Globe stubbornly refused to do, much to its detriment: respond to legitimate demands from the intelligent, news-consuming public.

 

For us, then, it all began with an effort to give a voice to the disaffected – to do what the media is supposed to do: speak truth to power. In this case, power was represented by the almighty New York Times Co. and its underling, the Boston Globe.

 

Even these media juggernauts were not powerful enough to withstand a fusillade of Cold, Hard Football Facts aimed at their well-protected bomb-thrower, at its most belligerent, bellicose and battle-tested gridiron grenadier. 

           

Of course, we could just tell you we were attempting to give voice to the disenfranchised – or we could do what we always do, and prove our point with a full frontal assault of facts and evidence.

 

In this case, our anti-Borges reputation began unexpectedly with an email we received early one Friday morning back in October 2004, just a month after the site launched.

 

“Tony from Malden (Mass.)" sat down in front of the tube that night, only to hear Borges call New England fans “idiots” live (or maybe taped) on TV.

 

The Patriots at the time were the defending Super Bowl champs, on their way to a second consecutive title and – this is the good part – they were 18 games into an NFL-record 21-game win streak now immortalized with an exhibit at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It's one of the great accomplishments in the annals of North American sports.

 

And yet there was Borges on the air, with NFL history unfolding before his very eyes, calling fans of this team “idiots” because they held the contemptible position of liking the quarterback who resurrected a franchise and led it into the record books.

 

Needless to say, “Tony from Malden” was a little ticked off when yet another factless Borges bombshell blew out his eardrums. So he whipped off an email to what was then this fledgling little site. And so began the first volley in a battle that would ultimately topple the Broadsheet Bully.

It didn’t take long for the story to pick up steam. Later that day, we followed up with another story, this one simply posting an exchange between one of our readers and Borges (as usual, the reader got the better of an overmatched Borges).

          

Again, this was a reader-driven event. We had no agenda. We sought out no evidence. We simply channeled the information of a peeved pigskin populace. We imagine it even felt a little refreshing for these folks to have their complaints suddenly see the light of day. The Globe could no longer surpress the discontent.

 

Being utterly unconcerned with Borges, we just kicked around for the rest of the season, revolutionizing football analysis in our spare time, until the Broadsheet Bully had the audacity – the sheer gaul – to question the Cold, Hard Football Facts in one of his columns.

 

That’s right. Borges had the temerity to suggest the Cold, Hard Football Facts are driven by agenda and that he speaks the truth. Laughable, we know. Ha, ha, ha, ha! Of course, you know how this story ends: with blood spewing out of every dismembered limb of Borges’ crippled credibility as he declared it only a flesh wound.

 

You get the picture. This was going to end in a bloodbath.

 

There was the random verbal thrust and parry with Borges here and there when he royally screwed up, like the time in the spring of 2005 when he ripped New England for not breaking the bank for part-time fullback Patrick Pass, the way Houston did for career special-teamer Moran Norris (who?). You know what happened: Pass became the AFC's leading Pro Bowl vote recipient among fullbacks at the end of the 2005 season, while Houston let Norris walk at the end of the season, after realizing they overpaid for a non-factor player; the conclusion of another grand moment of insight from Borges and his gimpy, punch-drunk agenda.

 

And then, of course, came the discovery in March that Borges penned a column using the words of another author. Once again, the Cold, Hard Football Facts had no agenda. We merely served as a conduit for disaffected football fans. We did not seek out the information. As usual, the information came to us from an alert reader ("Roninent73"), another one ready to repel the assault on intelligence that was the average Borges column. 

 

So once again, the shining knight of Cold, Hard Football Facts jousted with the dark forces of agenda and opinions. And, as always, agenda and opinions were knocked off their steed and repelled at our gates.