Basketball On The Internet.

SUNDAY Mail colleague Scott Walsh wrote a brilliant piece a few years ago when Mal Hemmerling "owned'' the Adelaide 36ers, which really reinforced something I have always believed about team sports.

At a time when Adelaide's NBL club was in crisis and Hemmerling had "gone bush'', Walshy tracked him down at Cable Beach in Broome, extracting a great quote from the elusive owner.

"People can write what they like,'' Hemmerling said. "It's my money and my team.''

Well, it may have been his money - that we will never truly know. But as for it being his team?

That could not be more incorrect.

While he was indeed its relevant custodian, the truth is owners, associations, sponsors, CEOs, coaches and players do NOT own professional sporting teams.

The fans do.

Once you lose sight of that, you may as well prepare to shut up shop and move on.

The people who buy the tickets, the T-shirts, the caps, the polos, who go on the road - the people who hang out for an autograph and follow the club through good and bad, their lives empowered by victories and shattered by defeats - THEY own any club.

It is an important fact to remember, especially in this brave new world of social media, of Twitter, Facebook, youtube and the rest, where club and fan interaction is so much more immediate than ever before.

WHILE all these innovations and the thousands still to follow continue to boggle the minds of anyone born before 1990, people are more inclined to question the role of the established media.

What do newspapers, radio and television really matter when you can bring up news on your phone, for example?

It's a good question and one media the world over is wrestling with as we cyberspeak.

Right now, we are not truly sure what we are, and that is the sad truth.

All you can do as an individual, is do the best at your own work station, and hope for the best around you.

You don't always get it.

Today for example, I wrote a piece for adelaidenow.com.au about Leeanne Grantham stepping down as Adelaide 36ers CEO.

In the story, I mentioned she had a difficult working relationship with coach Marty Clarke, which is absolutely the truth.

Is it why she resigned?

I wouldn't think so. My guess is she has something lined up which offers greater security than the tenuous long-term opportunities pro sports have to offer, especially in this country and in this sport.

It was a pertinent point to include because it is clear that across Adelaide's NBL club, not everyone is on the same page.

No blame for that relationship heading south - both Grantham and Clarke behave as consummate professionals publicly and are entitled to debate differing viewpoints privately - was apportioned.

Yet the online heading for the story was "Leeanne Grantham quits Adelaide 36ers amid reports of difficult working relationship with coach Marty Clarke''.

Say what?

There was no "report'' to that extent, just me including a fact which is an open secret in Adelaide.

It's one of the ways we get a bad name, when a random fact is sensationalised into the headline.

HELL NO, I am not writing this piece in an attempt to seek sympathy or approval, or to exonerate myself.

It's what happens and you wear it.

Any time you have to write about contentious or opinion-based issues, someone is going to get hurt.

It has never ceased to amaze me, and probably never will, that people can believe media delight in writing so-called "negative'' and "agenda-driven'' stories.

Let me assure you of something right now. Life is a lot more fun and a lot easier when the sporting team you cover is travelling well.

Unless you take some morbid pleasure in watching people fail and/or suffer, you want your sporting team to succeed.

Occasionally, if you are lucky, clubs will take you under their wing and share sensitive information with you and, on occasion, even ask your view on something.

Guess what? I was among the people pushing for Marty Clarke to be given his NBL shot by Adelaide.

We broke the story with some delight in The Advertiser days before the formal announcement because, like the rest of Australia, we were thrilled to have a man of Marty's calibre in Adelaide.

(Would I have signed him for three years with no KPI? No. But that's the difference between fans owning a sporting team and fans running a sporting team.)

We ran two extensive pieces about Marty and another about his offsider and assistant Mark Radford, and, truthfully, his elevation to become an NBL coach was long-awaited and very greatly anticipated.

It bemuses the hell out of me when people say I have an anti-Marty agenda. Having said that, stories with headlines like today's would support that conspiracy theory, unfortunately. And also, unfortunately, most people believe if you wrote the story, you wrote the headline and the picture captions, none of which is true.

When Brad Robbins retired earlier this week, it was obvious to ask Perth coach Rob Beveridge what replacements he was considering.

The second he mentioned Rhys Carter and CJ Massingale, I knew they were not names I could ignore.

But very readily for some, that becomes another part of this alleged anti-Marty propoganda.

You just have to shake your head and wonder how long you would stay employed if you ignored Carter and Massingale's names and wrote about Luke Cooper and Daniel Dillon.

LIKE anyone who follows the 36ers, I wanted Marty to be the best coach since Phil in his prime, and Radford to be his SJ (Steve Breheny).

I am pretty sure Clarke sees Radford that way too.

But the results did not come.

And that, unfortunately for the naive, is what professional sports is about.

You recall that fans own their teams?

Well, they will support their team through thick and thin if they are also treated with respect.

When you are going worse than your predecessor but stepping up and saying there had been a huge culture change for the better, you are asking your real owners to accept rhetoric.

They rarely do.

Marty had to learn to taper trainings in his first year and make adjustments from his time as an AIS mentor.

It wasn't a seamless transition and it is not my place as a member of the media to pretend it was.

NEGATIVITY.

I love that accusation. "The press is being negative.''

When a team wins a game and it is reported they won, that is NOT the media being positive.

It is just the media reporting WHAT IS.

When a team loses a game or is losing games and it is reported as such, that then is similarly not media being negative.

It is just the media reporting WHAT IS.

Adelaide's overtime loss to Perth on Sunday from a match-winning position. Is the report on how that match was lost a negative media in full swing?

Hardly. It is just reporting what is.

THIS is where the boundaries of social and traditional media cross over.

It is up to the clubs and the leagues to pump out everything in a positive light.

They use social media and before that press release and press conferences to get across their message however they want it delivered.

But it is NOT the job of the media to put positive spin on what is, essentially, spin.

It is our job to tell it as we see it and, trust this, that is often very difficult to do.

To be critical of a coach, to be critical of a player, to point out a management decision to be wrong or even heinous turns the person doing the telling into "the enemy''.

Now seriously, who sets out to alienate players, coaches, managements?

It is just something which has to be done at times when pursuing the truth of a story.

MORE years ago than I'd care to recall, Hall of Famer Darryl "The Iceman'' Pearce and I became very good friends.

We were regularly down at Apollo Stadium midweek, watching our respective partners playing state league games.

We started talking, started laughing and found we had similar senses of humor and a lot in common.

Before long we were friends, often talking smack on the phone and getting along very well.

Then the inevitable happened.

Darryl had a less-than-stellar finals series with the 36ers who were eliminated by Perth.

I was critical of his performances in Games Two and Three of that series.

I had crossed a boundary then because he took it very personally.

We did not talk again for several years, seemingly invisible to each other.

One afternoon at the old Athol Park Stadium, his wife of the time came up and asked me if I had a minute. I did.

I accompanied her to a seat in the stadium. She told me to wait there and returned with Darryl a minute later telling him to sit down beside me.

"Now sort it out,'' she told us.

If I never see her again, I will always love that she did that.

We spoke, we argued, we yelled, we laughed.

My point was that because we were friends, he had taken the criticism too personally, which he eventually conceded.

But he said, just as tellingly, that my criticism had been harsher because we were friends.

I had to think about that and most likely he was dead right.

But what I learned that day is you should not get too close to players, coaches while they are plying their trade because the day will come when that friendship is put to the test and the lines become blurred.

IN YEAR Two of Marty's reign, the team again was travelling below expectations, which was self-evident.

They would finish ninth of nine.

This is Adelaide, for a long time the second most successful club in the NBL and a club familiar with winning and playing finals. Not narrow gallant losses and platitudes about what is to come.

Again, as my role requires, I raised my misgivings about Marty's ability to deliver in the pro sports cauldron.

Is this personal?

Well, tell yourself it is if it makes you happy and suits your position.

But I don't know Marty well enough to dislike him and any exchanges we have had on a personal level have always been enlightening and engaging.

We've talked backgrounds, books, Olympics and when I had recent surgery, he was among the first to message me his best wishes.

Give me a reason to dislike him.

Many of his players are absolutely devoted to him and I understand why.

As the head honcho at the AIS, he was much more than a coach to Australia's burgeoning young talent.

He was a father, big brother and mentor, with a great value system to share, and life philosophies you could base all your future endeavors on.

His involvement and care for his charges went way beyond the day-to-day of coaching.

No-one has ever said Marty Clarke is not a good man or a great role model.

He cares about his players and still maintains contact with many who he helped develop into elite basketball players and young men in Canberra.

But we are entitled to disagree on his coaching ideas and abilities at the pro level.

WE ARE three years in and I am still not convinced he is flexible enough to make the right in-game decisions.

This is a viewpoint widely shared.

Often his substitution pattern leaves me cold and I think too many players have been signed and let go because they didn't suit his system.

Sometimes it's the system that doesn't work.

CJ Massingale blamed himself for not quickly picking up Marty's system.

Diamon Simpson's departure - which led him briefly to an NBA shot - also was more about not getting the system.

I didn't see a lot run to get Adam Ballinger an open look for his favorite baseline jumpshot.

Darren Ng had to run from Point A to Point B to Point C to get a three-ball off.

Sorry, but that's not basketball I enjoy watching or find entertaining.

Judging by the dwindling crowd numbers, I am not alone.

Once you bring in a weapon such as Luke Schenscher, all bets are off and you should be maximising his height and passing.

Townsville's Peter Crawford should send him a Christmas card for the next five years because it was Luke's passing out of the double-teams which gave him so many open looks and eventually an Olympic berth.

Is Adelaide getting that production this season?

LET me give you three sets of numbers: 25-38, 25-33, 22-45.

The 25-38 was Phil Smyth's win-loss record in his final two seasons as 36ers coach, which led to him getting the chop.

Adelaide's three-time championship coach and by far its most successful, he was jaded and disinterested and probably, had the club been smart, sending him away on a three-month holiday and bringing in some exciting new playing pieces might have been the tonic to rejuvenate him.

That said, as it played out, his time was up.

For mine, Phil had earned enough credits to be given a longer leash and he also was battling a management which was no-where near as supportive as his successors have had to deal with.

But we ran a full-page story, showing Phil's coaching graph and its steady decline and said his time was up.

You think that was fun to do?

That second figure, 25-33? That was Scott Ninnis' two-year win-loss record after he succeeded Phil.

It also included a finals trip, albeit brief.

When Scotty's team became the first Sixers side to finish last, everyone knew he had to go.

Truly, do you think that stuff was fun to write?

Do you believe that helped my relationship with the man or those players who were most loyal to him?

That third 22-45 figure, by the way, is Marty's current record and is inferior to both.

ANOTHER quick anecdote for you.

A few years ago when Lightning sacked Chris Lucas as its WNBL coach, I was all over the injustice of that decision.

I won't say who because it wasn't anyone from the Marino family but someone who worked for the organisation who asked me why we had gone so big on it?

So there you have it. On the one hand, people crave more publicity for their sport and for it to be treated with greater importance.

But when it is and what is written doesn't suit, insiders would like to go back into the minor sport mentality.

SUNDAY as I was exiting the Arena, I was assailed by one of Marty's most ardent supporters and asked when I would "stop writing lies.''

OK. The inference was I had deliberately misled the public when I wrote in Thursday's comment piece accompanying the news story on Massingale's axing that CJ had moved his family to Adelaide.

I admit, I had that wrong. I had seen CJ, his wife Leilani and their daughter Cydney more than once in Adelaide and incorrectly assumed he had brought them over. They had actually just been visiting him.

A mistake or a lie?

Your call.

If you believe I have an agenda, then it's the latter.

Within 48 hours though in Saturday's paper, I had rectified that.

Guess that didn't count for much.

I understand the frustrations because I share them.

In whose interest is it to have a bad team or an under-achieving team?

Does that help increase coverage?

Does that help increase the team's profile?

Think on this. Unless you are just a morbid, mean-spirited person with issues you need to address through therapy, it would be much more enjoyable for everyone to be the person writing about a Wollongong when it is sitting atop the table, than the one writing about a Townsville when it is 0-8 for example.

THE TRUTH is this.

Fans own sporting teams and they have a right to expect and demand answers.

Clubs and leagues will use social media to push out their viewpoint.

Traditional media doesn't answer to clubs or leagues.

We answer to those fans.

I make a point of sitting among them at Adelaide Arena, and did it before at Apollo, at Forestville, Bowden and Athol Park.

Always have. Always will. At home, anyway.

If criticism of a pro sports coach is more than he/she can take then they were never cut out for the job in the first place.

But to believe the critic is enjoying it when all it will mean is mistrust and animosity at both a professional and often even a personal level, is a nonsense.

I HAVE been told a few times I write with "an agenda''.

I think of colleague Michelangelo Rucci when I hear that and it irks me.

But I guess to some extent it is true.

My agenda is to continue to have a thriving basketball program at all levels in my state, NBL and WNBL representative teams we can be proud of and which can sustain their existence in devastatingly bad economic times.

But I don't work for the 36ers or the Lightning.

That doesn't mean I don't love them. It just means I'm not afraid of the consequences of tough love either.