John U Bacon Article about the 'Beav'
Not that beav. The Beav, Jay Flannelly. Most of us know the story of The Beav helping Jimmy feel the love from reading Endzone and a recent board conversation but this artcile was posted by JUB this morning. Enjoy all the feels that this last year has brought us.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:17 PM ^
The editing in this article is less sloppy. I found so many many typos and errors in the book, it got strange. Like Hagerup being from Whitewater, WI, instead of Whitefish Bay. Like Jim Harbaugh taking his team to the AFC championships. There were probably 10-15 typos too.
I wrote an email to John about how much I loved the book (I really did), but that there were some typos to get corrected for the next edition. He didn't bother replying.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:23 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 12:41 PM ^
and it's stinky
January 29th, 2016 at 12:44 PM ^
Bacon has addressed this.
There were apparently problems that went beyond Bacon, added when the book went from manuscript stage to final stage. It's all being corrected for the next printings.
If you're getting hung up on a few typos here and there instead of the whole book, you're just nitpicking. It's a great book.
January 29th, 2016 at 1:36 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 1:48 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 2:35 PM ^
In terms of content? I am sure JUB's books are lapped by most other non-fiction writers.
His books open a door to something Michigan fans hold very dear. That by itself doesn't raise the value or level of the content.
January 29th, 2016 at 1:59 PM ^
I hadn't heard this brought up on this site or that Bacon addressed this until now, during the writing and release and aftermath I avoided much of the coverage of the book because I knew it would be a while before I read it, and I didn't want any spoilers.
I'm not saying it's not a great book, I'm really enjoying it and I trust and believe the information that's there. But it's a helluva lot more than a few typos, and it's extremely noticable.
January 29th, 2016 at 2:43 PM ^
Reading it right now. Even the grammatical typos are cringeworthy at times. That being said, I am thouroughly enjoying the book. David Brandon is a villian of Geoffrey Baratheon-like proportions.
January 29th, 2016 at 2:25 PM ^
I'm actually happy to have a limited edition typo-laden edition of Endzone!
January 29th, 2016 at 4:44 PM ^
Need to have JUB include a 'Sorry for the typos' when he signs your limited edition "Endzone".
January 29th, 2016 at 4:33 PM ^
I enjoyed the book, but I'm not sure I buy that explanation for the typos. I'm sure the time crunch is the reason for the shoddy editing, but it's hard to imagine that he submitted an error-free manuscript and that subsequent editors, when giving a fresh eye to his writing, accidently introduced a bunch of mistakes.
January 29th, 2016 at 9:36 PM ^
but there is an instance where *someone* was using just letters for 2 people's names and that made it to the published book. It was obviously something that had been scribbled in during editing and not fixed/completed.
January 30th, 2016 at 8:12 AM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 12:23 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 12:24 PM ^
He did get blasted pretty hard for it by a lot of folks, but in the Q&A he did here, he spoke about how those came to be and how they're being addressed in subsequent printings.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:29 PM ^
beat me to it by a few minutes. Good call.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:24 PM ^
He's spoken about that in a few public appearances. Essentially the editing process was so compressed from the normal timeframe that a lot of avoidable mistakes happened because double and triple checking was thrown out the window. He said, along with some of his mistakes, there were also mistakes with the editor where a change was incorrectly made right before print and then sent to print without Bacon having the chance to re-fix it.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:26 PM ^
Pretty funny and fitting that a red-ass comment about the book's editing comes from someone with an image of a notorious red-ass.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:31 PM ^
The typos are addressed here: http://mgoblog.com/content/endzone-user-qa-john-u-bacon#more
For those interested who don't want to read the whole Q&A:
I’m very proud of this book, having started working on December 23, 2014, when I got the contract, then conducting over 100 interviews, marshaling some 16,000 verifiable facts, and writing 460 pages by July 18, 2015, a total of 209 days. I’m grateful that both sales and reviews have been very positive.
But when people ask me if I’d change anything, that brings us, alas, to the damned typos, missing words, grammatical glitches and the like. As you might imagine, the lion's share of the blame falls squarely on my shoulders. I jammed the production people by turning in a thick manuscript, three months later than we’d hoped. Further, on the final pass, when you’re supposed to be making the smallest, fewest changes, I was making substantial edits in red ink, with arrows pointing here and there, words and sentences cut and added, and often whole paragraphs inserted or slashed. This is playing with fire, because it forces the production people to do far more work, and do it far faster, than they normally would.
When I got back my first copy of the actual book in early August, I buzzed through it in a couple days, and that’s all I needed to see what the readers would see weeks later: more simple mistakes than I’ve had in my previous six books, combined. I catalogued dozens of such errors, far more than any reader has sent me. Easily the most wince-worthy: “Michigan” is spelled incorrectly four times. (I am pleased to report that I’ve been spelling “Michigan” correctly for several years now.)
Even with all the pressure I had put on the production people, by making so many changes so late, the number and kind of mistakes I marked in the actual book still didn’t make sense. I was seeing mistakes I knew I hadn’t made myself in the final draft – like misspelling Michigan. If any reader had gone over the final pass, they would have caught most of the typos I had.
When I brought this to my editor’s attention, he came back a week later confirming what I suspected: something else had gone wrong in the process, beyond the rate of errors. He sent me the following (reprinted with his permission):
“With the extremely short turnaround time, we created an extra pass to help us review any and all last minute corrections. Unfortunately, in the creation of that additional pass, new errors were introduced into the pages. Since we weren't looking for them or expecting them, they were never caught.”
And there’s your answer: after I had handed it in, new errors were actually introduced into the final copy.
My editor agreed to incorporate all my fixes into the second printing and eBook, which will cost the publisher (and yours truly) time and money. This is not standard operating procedure, because most manuscripts don’t get corrected until the paperback comes out a year later, but we all agree it’s worth it.
I was waiting to turn in this Q&A until I had final word on when that would happen, and we just heard from production this week [ed: week of November 20]: The cleaned up version will be available in eBooks in two weeks, with the second printing coming out soon thereafter. Later than I’d like, of course, but still glad to get closure on that front.
The good news is the research and interviews that took so much time have held up very well, and all but a few readers have greatly enjoyed the book and appreciated the work involved.
January 29th, 2016 at 12:48 PM ^
As you can tell by my points total, I haven't been on the board long, especially to see this.
Glad I wasn't imagining things and it makes sense now.
Then it's pretty unfair to John for his work to be misrepresented. His other books were pretty flawless.
I take my criticism back, of course.
January 29th, 2016 at 1:12 PM ^
Bacon is sort of a sacred cow here. Your criticism did not strike me as harsh at all (probably wouldn't strike Bacon as harsh either, since apparently he recognized the problem). I'm not quite sure why you got the backlash you did today.
FWIW, my observation is that Bacon will miss out on a few details here and there in other work too. I saw that in Three And Out, which also had some factual misstatements. And I've seen it in a few of his articles too. I don't think he gets the editing support some others get, but that's conjecture.
But Bacon's connections and access are unparalleled, so the vibe here seems to be not to voice criticism of Bacon. Especially since Bacon is friends with Brian and Ace. And Bacon has a keen sense of what's OK to share with the unwashed masses (us) without vexing his contacts. And he plainly loves Michigan and Michigan Athletics.
Net-net I'm very glad he's on this beat.
January 29th, 2016 at 1:29 PM ^
so Bacon didn't reply personally to you about something he already knew.
January 29th, 2016 at 4:57 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 29th, 2016 at 12:23 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 12:32 PM ^
good to see you're improving...
January 29th, 2016 at 12:25 PM ^
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
January 29th, 2016 at 12:38 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 1:06 PM ^
This guy's a hero.
January 29th, 2016 at 1:09 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 1:14 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 1:30 PM ^
another shining example of the collective knowledge, intelligence and just flat out loyalty/appreciation of fans that would actually boo their own team.
Way to go! Be proud.
Tom was afraid to make a mistake, or he'd get pulled -- and it got to him," Flannelly says. "When [Syracuse quarterback] Donovan McNabb came in and killed us, fans were booing Tom and cheering Drew. They wanted Tom benched and Drew in the game. It was tough, and I gained a lot of respect for Tom.
January 29th, 2016 at 1:45 PM ^
"I went down to retrieve them and Tom, whom I recognized only as one of several football players living in the building, was standing at the dryer folding my laundry and leaving it in a neat stack on the dryer. It was notable at the time only because most people, myself included, would have left the clothes in a pile on top of the dryer, but Tom had taken the time to fold them."
As an admittedly irrelevant aside, I have been known to be like this - I did the laundry of others because it got to me when people would pile it everywhere and I still to this day will wash dishes at other homes because I can't look at a dirty sink. My OCD did not attach itself to later success as an NFL QB sadly.
On a more relevant note, this is one of the exceprts from "Endzone" that grabbed me the most, strangely enough, because it always seems like these unlikely connections end up being instrumental down the road, whether the person is famous or not.
January 29th, 2016 at 2:34 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 9:58 PM ^
Cato June
Mike Wallace or Wally Weber
Eddie McDoom
Caitlin Haskell - water polo assistant coach
January 30th, 2016 at 8:34 AM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 6:09 PM ^
January 29th, 2016 at 8:23 PM ^
The article states that The Beav was a Michigan student from 1995 until 1999 and now washes dishes at Pizza House. Is this correct? If so, it's certainly an unusual career choice.