A WEEI Listener Punked Ron Borges Into Writing a Fake News Story About Brady Holding Out on His Contract
The world woke up to some pretty incendiary stuff out of the Tom Brady camp, as reported by old school, hardboiled football journalist Ron Borges in the Herald:
At least there WAS a story. I know there was because I read it before they took it down. It was all about how Tom Brady was essentially sick of taking less money than he could from the Patriots and those days were over and he was going to sit out all off-season team activities until he got paid more than Jimmy Garoppolo. And Borges’ take was pretty much “good for Brady for sticking it to the man at long last because he’s been getting pushed around for too long and a shook Belichick had to do this in a pathetic attempt to win back his locker room” etc. etc.
Borges didn’t mention his source by name. But we know it was Don Yee, the agent to both Brady and Jimmy G. Well, not the Don Yee. The fake Don Yee, Kirk and Callahan listener Nick in Boston telling Ron he’s Don Yee:
And that was all it took for Borges to run with the story. A text from a sports talk listener claiming to be somebody. No follow up. No confirming he was who he said he was. If you call to order a pizza, they’ll make note of your number in case you’re just pranking them into making a pizza they can’t sell. But a guy who’s been covering the Patriots literally since he was banging out his angry diatribes on a manual typewriter in the ’70s is so desperate, not only for relevance but to embarrass the team, that he doesn’t need anything more to go on than a text from someone he doesn’t know. It would pathetic if it wasn’t so goddamned funny.
Just by way of background and a short history lesson, I’ve been clapping at Ron Borges since back when Barstool was just a newspaper. He was exactly the kind of dinosaur we were taking on, even then. Guys still trying to operate under the old system where ink-stained wretches like him had all the power and the people they covered and the readers had no choice but to take it. Barstool was – and still is – the response. The voice of the common man, calling guys like him out. That same dynamic led to Borges being fired from The Globe when a reader caught him copying and pasting a whole passage out of a Seattle paper without accreditation, something no one at Barstool would be caught dead doing. Even though to guys like him we’re just a bunch of uneducated fanboys.
Way back in the day, Ctrl+C Borges was once a respected Patriots writer. He’s the one who broke the (very true) story of widespread cocaine use on the 1985 team the day after the Super Bowl loss to the Bears. He had them drafting Terry Glenn in 1996 when Bill Parcells’ bestie Will McDonough didn’t. But then Bill Belichick took over and Borges resented him so much he’s written a non-stop stream of delusional, hate-spewing garbage ever since. Buying into every scandal and -Gate. Making regular use of the word “arrogance.” He once wrote a preview of NFL free agency where he ranked Adalius Thomas the best player on the market. The next day the Pats signed Thomas. And the day after that, Borges wrote a hit piece on Thomas calling him a “system linebacker” who was only good because of Ray Lewis.
Then there’s the time Borges accused the team of being responsible for Aaron Hernandez because they replaced their old head of security with a guy whose only qualification was, ya know, keeping the London Olympic Games safe from terrorist attacks. Because their old guy would have … what? Known Hernandez was a killer? Gotten the word on the street from every shoe shine man and newstand owner on the streets of Foxboro? Then he claimed that David Halberstam and Michael Holley wrote books about Belichick only because Belichick asked them to. Ron was also never shy about hinting around in interviews that there was some dirt on Belichick’s personal life and if anyone knew the real truth … well then, boy … somethingsomething … without ever explaining what the Christ he was talking about. Which is the bitchiest sort of personal attack you can possibly sleaze another man with.
But Ol’ Ron’s favorite false narrative was always that the Patriots are cheap. That Lord Kraft is basically operating under the Feudal system with Belichick as the overseer, keeping the peasants down. So naturally his Confirmation Bias kicked in, he swallowed this absolute lie whole, turned it into Fake News and now it’s gone around the globe.
Welcome to the state of capital-J Journalism in 2018. And here’s to the end of Ron Borges’ long and now extinguished career.
