I need proof, Pearl. Real proof.

No smoking gun. No witnesses. You’d think someone making an outlandish claim would have some kind of proof before running his mouth, right?
In a column I wrote for Monday’s paper, I said:

Until the final two minutes, Buffalo largely walked through the motions, and the crowd at HSBC knew it. Aside from some booing of Zdeno Chara, those who showed up could have caught some shuteye. Someone in the press box asked if it would be wrong to put the Davidson-Kansas game on the JumboTron while the teams were playing. It wasn’t a bad idea.

So Matt Pearl from Channel 2 starts a rumor that this whole thing was his idea!
I do the journalistically ethical thing to do — and ask him why he thinks I’d steal his idea. You know how those TV people are, though. They’re too busy primping and applying pancake makeup to really listen. Pearl said he wasn’t sure who came up with the idea, but he was sorry if this had caused a rift, and he promised to send a couple dozen autographed pictures of himself to the paper.
Sheesh.