Track Scars

Kreissler did outrun his rival, finishing first in the return leg to the school. But nobody took any times. "I didn't bring a watch," Kreissler says.

Two days after they got back, the coaches got a call from the Examiner.

Jim Conaway had been a stringer for local newspapers -- writing stories on a freelance basis -- for 18 years. "The Star pays the best," Conaway says, but over the years he's written for the Kansas City Kansan, the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Sedalia Democrat. In 1989 or 1990, he says, he began stringing for the Examiner.

He and Billington went way back. In the early 1970s, he says, "Tom was a runner at Raytown High School. I ran for Raytown South. Then after college, we became active as cross-country coaches. ... I consider him a friend. I still do to this day. I just hate that everything turned out the way that it did."

In the fall of 2003, the Examiner was paying Conaway to write a Monday round-up of local teams and their weekend events. But by Tuesday, September 23, Conaway says he still hadn't heard from the Truman coaches about their previous week's La Jolla trip.

He managed to catch Earley first, calling the coach at home. But Conaway says Earley begged off, saying he was too busy for an interview. So Conaway then called Billington.

Earley disputes that, telling the Strip that he did speak briefly with the Examiner freelancer -- long enough, anyway, to tell him that the event in La Jolla hadn't been a newsworthy event. But Conaway asked if there was a Web site where he could get the results. Earley says he repeated what he'd already said: "No, Jim, it was just a practice."

Later on Tuesday night, Conaway called Billington at home. The first thing Billington told him? "He explained that dual meets can be loose in structure and informal affairs. The team score wasn't even figured," Conaway tells the Strip. "He proceeded to give me his list of boy runners and where they finished."

Conaway insists that Billington also gave him times for the boys' runs, and then did the same for the girls' team. "From there, with it just being two squads, we figured out a team score."

Now, let that sink in for a moment.

Conaway, who would go on to write the brief Examiner item that got two respected coaches suspended, says now that Billington told him from the very beginning that the event in California had been informal.

But when we asked him why his news story gave the complete opposite impression -- that a formal meet had taken place -- he says that was just the way things were done at the Examiner. Although dual meets had evolved, he says, the format for reporting on them hadn't changed since the 1950s.

"I knew that, yes, this meet ... was more loose-knit in nature," he says. But his story didn't reflect it, he admits, because he was adhering to a news style laid down half a century before.

Still, today Conaway seems to believe that he only stepped over a line when he asked Billington for a quote from Earley.

"Then the part I guess that I did wrong," he tells us, "was that Tom gave me a comment on how the boy runners had performed. And then the quote I used for Chris Earley was not verbatim from Chris." But Conaway says that this wasn't unusual at the Examiner. "There have been lots of times at the Examiner, say, maybe an assistant coach will call in a score, and we will not talk directly to the head coach. But that assistant will give us a statement for how the head coach felt about the game. It's done all the time."

Billington denies that he gave Conaway the Earley quote or that he gave him times. In fact, he points out, almost nothing about the story was correct. Conaway had the teams attending a football game (didn't happen) and running their event with La Jolla from Balboa Park (it actually began at the high school), and had the event happening on Saturday (it occurred on Thursday).

Ten days after his article appeared, Conaway heard that Billington and Earley were in the process of being fired. "I felt responsible," Conaway says. He says he wrestled with his conscience for a day, and then, Sunday night, October 5, called the Examiner's sports editor, Zinke. "I told him exactly what had happened ... I had put in the quote without talking directly to the source."

But, we asked, did he also indicate to Zinke what Billington had said from the beginning of their conversation, that this had been a loose, informal event and that Conaway and Billington had added up the scores together? "I told him that, yes."

Zinke denies that Conaway had told him that he'd added up the scores, but he did acknowledge to the Strip that Conaway related Billington's insistence that the meet was more a practice than a championship event.

When Zinke wrote his correction on October 7, he apologized to readers for the Examiner's use of the Earley quote and reported that he'd suspended Conaway (without naming him).