Yes, but it isn't some nuclear weapon secret.
Dunno if you've been around long enough to remember the story of Armando Salguero and Chris Cordero plagiarizing stuff written by Simon Clancy and I for Dave Hyde of the Sun Sentinel.
These were the Draft Winds days, when Simon and I were doing feature blog posts for Dave Hyde of the Sun Sentinel.
All the sudden Armando comes out with a helper of his own, aspiring scout Chris Cordero. Who by all means, by the way, is probably a good person. But he made a mistake.
Cordero starts penning stuff for Armando's blog. Some of it looked suspicious but I wasn't about to make a federal case of it or anything.
At the time though, Simon and I were scouring the internet (twitter wasn't quite what it is today, this was a decade ago), soliciting information from our own contacts in media, contacts we had among agents, direct conversations with players, even direct things I witnessed as I've been attending East-West Shrine practices for a very long time now, and we had been forming a running list of players that Miami have met with. This was something we updated each week on Dave Hyde's blog under the Draft Winds heading. Miami used to get something like 80% of their players from the list. By the end of this particular draft year, I believe there were 118 names on this particular list, something like that.
Then right on the eve of the Draft, Armando Salguero publishes a list of his own on his blog, sourcing it from Chris Cordero. This looked...more than suspicious.
It was
our list. Right down to the mis-placing of several commas, the idiosyncratic way Simon had labeled a few guys' positions, etc.
Cordero had dragged his mouse across our list to copy and paste, hilariously and accidentally failing to drag it ALL THE WAY down so he had actually forgotten an entire position group. So it looked like the Dolphins met with all these players at every single position...except corners. No corners whatsoever. Cordero added ONE name of his own, that was not already present on our list, that of Carlos Dunlap whom he had fawned over in a previous blog post. Then he deleted maybe half a dozen obscure names so that he could round the list off at an even 100 names.
Then he added commentary to the position groups.
Simon was furious, came at Armando guns blazing. Armando was petulant in reply, saying Simon had no proof, and had an editor at the Herald essentially send Simon a legal cease and desist notice. Simon rang up a lawyer friend of his own and pointed out the identical grammar mistakes, the idiosyncratic position labeling, and the fact he had a word document with a record of change dates to prove this was his list.
Cordero fessed up to the Herald what he'd done and was let go. Kudos to him. I haven't spoken to him since the incident, but indirectly through a mutual friend he's expressed significant contrition. He was young and dumb. Totally forgivable.
What isn't as forgivable is the much older and supposedly 'professional' Armando Salguero absolutely INSISTING, right up to and through the public retraction that was FORCED on him by higher-ups at the Herald (after hearing from higher-ups at the Sun Sentinel), that absolutely nothing untoward had happened, that all Cordero did was copy and paste "the format" of a list, but NOT the content, and that his list differed significantly because it had commentary, but that since HE (Armando Salguero) operates under the highest standards of integrity and professionalism, he is deleting the list from his blog so as to avoid even the barest appearance of impropriety.
And trust me, his attitude was no different in private email conversation about it.
I tend to be a pretty forgiving and very accepting person, but I also keep receipts. You engage in some f-ckery, ok fine just step up and say you're sorry and move on. If you never express even a hint of contrition and try and hide behind bull sh-t excuses the entire way, those receipts stay in a box in the closet. I've got a long memory.
