This morning, I went in a bit on Les Bowen sending a complaint tweet to Darren Sproles, who was himself complaining about the media making up stories. Les’ response – that Sproles wouldn’t have to worry about people making things up if he answered his texts – was misguided. It suggests that the only way to get the story is directly from the athlete or their agent, with the athlete or their agent doing the heavy lifting, and if they don’t want to do that, they’ll have to get used to false reports. He was probably also irritated that Sproles cut out the middle man and tweeted his motivation directly.

Anyway, Les had an issue with my post, and decided to tweet Kyle about it.

Now, while there’s some stuff in there that is Kyle and not me – such is the editing process (we have one, I swear) and Kyle certainly added a little more venom to my sentiment – the byline carries my name. See?

bowen byline

And sure, @CrossingBroad is both Kyle’s handle and the de facto official site handle, but you’d think a reporter who does such great work would notice, I dunno, who wrote a thing he’s yelling at someone else about. I even tried to help him out, the equivalent of responding to a text, I guess:

He still hasn’t reached out to insult me, but that didn’t stop him from going at Kyle, who is with his son today:

Kyle responded:


It’s not that Les doesn’t do work – skulking around outside Chip Kelly’s house counts as work, and was fairly spirited reporting – but tooting your horn as a tried and true, ink in your veins, newspaper man in 2016 isn’t a good look, especially if you’re reporting amounts to firing off a text or two.

When reached for comment – through text, naturally – Kyle responded to Les’ “monetize himself” tweet by saying “I got a nickel from the old man. A WHOLE NICKEL!” Part of that nickel is mine.