My former colleague Bruce Plasket should be enjoying the results of his hard work. But he’s stewing in Albuquerque, wondering if his book will ever see the light of day.
His book is “Buffaloed: How race, gender, and media bias fueled a season of scandal.” It’s about football at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Plasket spent many hours last fall with the team, and concluded that the program and its participants were being demeaned by unsubstantiated allegations that were orchestrated by Prescient Communications, a public-relations firm engaged by the attorneys for Lisa Simpson, a young woman who was suing CU for fostering an environment hostile to women.
Plasket’s book was supposed to be published this year by Prentice-Hall. But Baine Kerr, a Boulder attorney who represents Simpson, sent a 60-page letter to Prentice-Hall which charged that Plasket’s book was misleading or worse. The letter had the phrase “swamp of litigation.”
Prentice-Hall had already begun to publicize the book: “The story he tells is shocking: a caché of false charges and hidden agendas, of manipulative PR firms and politicians without integrity.” But after the lawyer’s letter, the publisher backed out, and even demanded that Plasket repay his advance.
Bruce Plasket and I first met in the fall of 1973 when he was in student government at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and I was managing editor of the campus paper, the Mirror. Just when I needed a news editor, he quit the student congress. He’d taken Newswriting 101, and he was smart and energetic. He went on to edit the Mirror.
Our paths crossed again in Breckenridge in early 1978. I was editing the Summit County Journal; he was in town visiting a friend and stopped by. He was unemployed and I needed a reporter. He went on to edit the Journal.
In the fall of 1983, we were both unemployed, and we co-wrote a book, “The White Stuff: The Bottom Line on Cocaine,” published by Dell in 1985. It did not make our fortunes, or turn us into big-time authors, and we both returned to journalism.
He’s good at it. While at the Cañon City Daily Record, he got the dirt on the Fremont County attorney in a scandal connected to the county welfare department by some literal digging – at the county landfill, where the incriminating correspondence had been dumped.
More recently, he won a Society of Environmental Journalists award for his work detailing the deficiencies of Cotter’s uranium mill in Cañon City. Until he quit last year to write his book, he covered the federal courts in Denver for the Longmont Daily Times-Call.
In all the years I’ve known and worked with Bruce, he’s been what a good journalist should be: skeptical, tenacious, and willing to follow the story wherever it takes him.
Last year, we argued about the CU football program. He said the Denver media were getting led by the nose by a hired PR firm. I told him he was talking to the wrong guy. I’m one of those liberal-arts weenies who believes that big-time college football, even if it were run in perfect conformance to all known rules, is inherently corrupt and a perversion of a university’s mission.
Plasket said his book might change my mind. Probably not – I’ve heard too many interviews with college-grad athletes who cannot speak anything close to grammatical English. Football may be a fine sport. So put the training leagues somewhere else, and quit prostituting our universities with it.
I’d like a chance to read his book, though. However, the politically correct powers of Boulder haven’t stopped with Prentice-Hall. The company Bruce has been working with to self-publish his book has gotten litigation jitters.
“How can those Boulder [expletives deleted] be so fearful about a book they haven’t even read?” Bruce asked. “The book wasn’t libelous to begin with, attorneys have been over it twice since then, and yet the threat of being sued has publishers running for cover.”
That isn’t the America we thought we lived in long ago when our paths first crossed. “What the hell kind of country is this,” Bruce said, “when Pat Robertson can go on the air and call for an assassination, and I can’t publish what I know about the CU football program? Eventually I’ll get it out, one way or another, but topical books have a shelf life, and they’ll play the delay game until nobody cares.”
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
