Heat City

This issue of the Phoenix New Times will be on racks throughout the NBA All-Star weekend.

With the NBA All-Star Game hitting Phoenix in just a few days, the Valley’s major alternative weekly newspaper says it has fallen victim to a “hoax” for its latest cover story looking at the trend of basketball players inking up.

As part of the story, the Phoenix New Times interviewed several Suns players about the NBA’s proposed “tattoo cap,” where teams would only be allowed to have a certain number of players with neck and upper-arm tattoos. “That’s B.S.,” Amar’e Stoudemire, the Suns forward who’s scheduled to start in Sunday’s game, told the paper. “They can’t put a cap on NBA players. It’s a part of life.”

Turns out it actually was B.S. No such restriction has ever been proposed by the NBA.

According to the New Times, which retracted the information immediately after learning it was wrong, the story relied on a blog posting about the so-called “tattoo cap” that turned out to be pure satire.

“Though our knee-jerk reaction to the tattoo cap story was that it might be a joke, what it touted seemed possible,” wrote Niki D’Andrea, the cover story’s author, in the paper’s retraction. After all, the NBA had already instituted a dress code for players, so why couldn’t rules on tattoos be next? When calls to the NBA to verify the story went unreturned, the paper went with it anyway. “Whatever the NBA’s response,” D’Andrea wrote, “the story’s a hoax — and we’re the one with egg on our face.”

Apparently it was a blogger from Pennsylvania California (see comments) who caught the mistake in the first place. The blogger, who goes only by the name “Alana G.” now has a lengthy post criticizing the New Times.

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