Investigative Citizen Journalism

If you know me at all, you know I’m a die-hard Utah Jazz fan. I feel personally invested in their success. When they lose, it physically hurts sometimes. Deep down.

So when I thought someone tried to pull a fast one on other Jazz fans like myself, I put a stop to it.

Here’s what happened.

Gordon Hayward became a fan favorite at the end of the season last year. After being the 9^th overall pick by the Jazz last year, he started slowly and struggled to find success. But now he is viewed as one of the building blocks for the future of the franchise.

He is fairly active on Twitter, and I have been following him since the day he became a Jazzman. I knew the things he would usually talk about and the way he would typically say them.

Well, one day, I caught wind of a Gordon Hayward profile on Facebook. Not a fan page like most athletes have, but one that anyone could actually request to be friends with. This was the first red flag. For a professional athlete to only have that many friends was strange. And for those of you who don’t already know, Facebook puts a stop to people who reach a certain limit of friends.

But it was worse than just having a profile. He was actually responding to almost every wall post and comment on his page. That’s when it started to get really out of ordinary. No way he would have time to respond back to everyone. I talked with other people about it, but most of them seemed to believe it was real.

To me it seemed obvious it was a fake. All of the pictures were taken from a Google image search. He would post the weirdest things. Stuff that not even a dumb NBA player would write about the NBA commissioner, let alone a class act in Gordon Hayward. And he would never even mention his girlfriend, which he never stops talking about on Twitter. Plus there were no real pictures of the two together. He pretty much just seemed like a different person.

Well, Gordon fever seemed to be taking off in the Salt Lake area. Every day it seemed like more and more of the people I knew were becoming friend too. So even if it was real, the exclusivity and cool factor of being friends with an NBA player was gone.

So I decided to do some investigating/experimenting. I wrote on his wall that the account was fake. And very soon after that the comment was deleted, I was defriended, and he had blocked my account from viewing his.

Seems strange for a real person to be worried about something like that. I mean, if someone called me out for not being the real me, I’d just comment and ask what they were talking about. The guilty are always more nervous.

That’s when I knew. So I updated my status to let everyone else know. And even then, a lot of people still believed him. At least, they didn’t really have any other reason not to believe him.

So I decided to go right to the source. Luckily, on Twitter, celebrities have a little blue check next to their name to prove they are a verified account. I figured it was a long shot, but told him what was up. Here’s what happened:

And the rest is history. Mystery solved.

So I guess I can always try a career in detective work if nothing else works out.

Don’t worry Gordo. I got your back.

Go Jazz.

 

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