How the 49ers Turned a Car Accident Into a Conspiracy Theory
Plus a media war over 49ers reporting
I checked my phone on Saturday morning because I craved a light distraction. I’d played a horrible 9 holes of golf on this family vacation and was counting on the start of San Francisco 49ers Training Camp to adjust my focus. Football was finally back, a predictable rhythm had returned to our lives. Except, there was a surprise in store. On the first day of camp, the 49ers announced that head coach Kyle Shanahan had been in a serious car accident. The other driver is fine, apparently, but Kyle is recovering.
Shanahan broke his nose, three ribs and his hand, needed more than 40 stitches in his face, and suffered a severe concussion during a July 14 car crash when he collided with an SUV near his northern California home, according to sources familiar with the situation.
A broken nose? Three ribs? His hand? An entire 40 stitches? Nobody was cited, somehow. Downtown Palo Alto?
Then the real kicker.
Wait, it happened back July 14??? And oddly, as I read over this ESPN article on a Monday morning, there’s still a typo in this massive story’s second paragraph?
This was arguably the biggest sports news of the weekend, featured on the ESPN.com front page, and two days later, the story still has a misspelled word in the second sentence, just hanging there. I don’t want to focus too much on typos because I live in a glass house here and it’s irrelevant, but something about that aspect fits with the general messiness of the revelation.
That lingering typo isn’t why some critics were lamenting the demise of sports journalism, though. Instead it was the timing of the news reveal, which occurred an entire 11 days after the crash. Why did the 49ers keep the incident secret? What were they hiding? Did the official sports media conspire with the team to keep a huge story under wraps? That last question has resulted in open argument between sports media figures. One of the people involved in that debate is my friend and former boss Tim Kawakami. I’ve got some thoughts on why and how this 49ers news was processed in such a confounding way.