I Cheated And Won (Sort of)

Saw a post on Facebook the other day from my high school journalism teacher, who was officially known as Mrs. Burr but everyone called her Aunt Sally.
Aunt Sally deserves a lot of credit for the shred of a journalism career I have left. She demanded a lot out of us, which forced us to put out a good product, which put us ahead of the curve when we got to college. A very high percentage of our high school newspaper staff has gone on to work professionally in one aspect of journalism or another.
When I saw her Facebook post, I got to thinking about some of my favorite memories from those days at Westmoore High School's "Jag Wire." (Care to guess what our school mascot was?) Several are blog-worthy, but this is the one I'm writing about today.

Every spring we got to go to OU for a journalism contest and workshop. My junior year, I was the assistant editor of the Jag Wire, and my friend Lisa Salter was the editor. Then as now, all I really cared about was sports, so I did mostly sports stories. Lisa, being smart and mature, actually wrote about things that mattered.
Aunt Sally wanted us to broaden our horizons. She entered me in the news competition, and Lisa in the sports. I was not happy. I jokingly said to Lisa, "We should just write each other's stories." She said, "Fine with me, I'm about to graduate anyway."
Since the organizers of the workshop probably assumed that nobody would bother cheating in a high school journalism contest, they made it incredibly easy to cheat.
No matter which contest you were entered in, they had all of us in the same giant room with lots of computers. They handed you a few sheets of paper with facts and quotes and you would have 30 minutes to write your story. Once you typed your story and printed it off, you just signed a cover sheet with your name on it and turned it in.
So Lisa and I pick up our packets, switch them, sit next to each other, print off our stories at the same time, switch them back, sign the cover sheet and turn them in.
As we met over at the printer, I said, "Lisa, you better have written me a really good story because I nailed this thing. You're going to win."
We spent the rest of the afternoon going to our workshops before everybody met up for the awards ceremony. I told Lisa, "You better be ready to walk up there and accept your award. Am I going to be a state champion news writer?"
"No," she said. "You think I actually tried? I'm about to graduate."
Sports was one of the first categories awarded. I sat with a smug grin as they gave out third place and second place to a couple of yahoos who never stood a chance, and I laughed out loud when Lisa Salter of Westmoore High School, who had STILL never written a sports story in her entire life, was named the state champion sports writer.
The next morning, I was in my first class of the day -- science or something -- when Aunt Sally came over the intercom to speak to all 2,000 students at Westmoore High School.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have a state champion sports writer in our midst!" As she started to do a fake drum roll, everyone in my class looked at me, because I covered the football team for the paper. I had to just sit there as she gushed about how Lisa was such an amazing writer. I think someone even pointed at me and said, "You lost to a girl???"
Of course, neither of us said anything to anyone. I certainly couldn't risk doing any further damage to my journalistic reputation, since my public-address mishap was only a few months old.
At the end of her proud report, Aunt Sally threw in a line about how Matt Franklin got honorable mention in news reporting. Honorable mention? What a joke. I think the Chick-Fil-A cows get honorable mention at these things.
In journalism class that day, I was about to punch a hole in the wall when Aunt Sally spent 30 minutes talking about how important it was to adapt to different kinds of writing. That's why she had entered us all in different categories than we were used to writing. Lisa Salter was really a shining example of someone who could cover any kind of story and do it well. Some of the rest of us needed to learn a lesson from that, including the guy who was going to be editor the next year.
The next year, when I was a senior and the editor of the paper, Aunt Sally entered me in the sports competition. She said, "I have high expectations for you. Lisa never even wrote sports and she won this award last year."
So I get to OU and pick up the packet and -- lo and behold! -- the fact sheet is the exact same one from the year before. It was about a baseball game that the home team won in the bottom of the ninth. (Not sure why I remember that).
I didn't want to write the exact same story as I had the year before, for fear that I would get busted. I tried to write a good story, but one that was noticeably different from Lisa's winner the year before. (In hindsight, I'm sure I could have printed off the exact same story and nobody would have known). As I turned it in, I remember thinking, "That story sucked."
At the awards ceremony, some yahoo who shouldn't have had a chance got first place.
I got honorable mention.