Sportsbeat, Friday, Feb. 6
Wow. I thought it was tight Thursday. Five pages doesn’t leave much room to get everything in, but we did our best.
Keeping with tradition, we made the Lake Orion-Pontiac Northern girls basketball game our “centerpiece” item, a true ‘TIE-UP’ at the top of the OAA Red.
Second-most attention goes to the Wolverines’ much-needed conference win over Penn State. Not to be outdone, our local product, Oakland University, beat conference foe Oral Roberts.
Typically you’ll find OU on the front page, as we’ve taken to covering both Golden Grizzlies’ basketball programs, a change from year’s past. Oakland’s been in Division I long enough where it’s making waves, toppling Top 25 teams and even making the NCAA Tournament.
Tennessee coach Pat Summitt reached a huge milestone, collecting career win No. 1,000. A case could be made for that to go out front because of its significance, but when we have staff writers producing topical columns, it’s unreasonable to push those inside.
After two pages of a strong local presence, we have the final page, dedicated to “world” items — essentially anything important that didn’t already go somewhere. Sure, it would be great to expound on Michael Phelps’ suspension, update the Bonds trial and have a separate story on Matt Cassel, but with the changing nature of this industry, page counts are shrinking and these items are reduced to briefs.
What didn’t make it in was this:
Boxer Calzaghe retires with undefeated record
LONDON (AP) — Former super-middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe retired from boxing Thursday with a perfect 46-0 record.
“I’ve got no other goals to go for,” he said. “That’s why I am calling it a day.”
The 36-year-old Welshman outpointed Roy Jones Jr. in November in his last fight of a 16-year pro career.
Calzaghe held the WBO super middleweight world title for more than 10 years, unifying the title against Mikkel Kessler in April 2007, before moving up to light heavyweight to fight Bernard Hopkins and Jones.
Good enough for a full story, but most people don’t know who he is, it’s going to look odd making the other items shorter, and there you go. Executive decisions such as that one are constantly made by the copy editors of Sportsbeat.
Ahh, another night in the life. Until next time.

Any questions, comments, concerns, take a couple minutes and send me an e-mail at paul.kampe@oakpress.com. Looking forward to hearing from our loyal readers.