Photographers wait on the track for the start of the 2019 Kentucky Derby.

Churchill Downs lead outrider Greg Blasi catches a runaway filly at the start of the 2019 Kentucky Oaks.

Churchill Downs lead outrider Greg Blasi catches a runaway filly at the start of the 2019 Kentucky Oaks.

Photographers wait on the track for the start of the 2019 Kentucky Derby.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- My right elbow hurts like crazy. Tennis elbow, the doctor told me Wednesday.

I think they should call it photographer's elbow. That's probably why I can't lift a drink with my right hand these days without wincing in pain. (No need for sympathy. The good Lord gave us two arms for a reason, I believe is how Louisville women's basketball coach Jeff Walz puts it.)

I mention this because of the news of the week. One of my brethren, WLKY's Fred Cowgill, has sued Trinity High School after suffering as bad a knee injury as you can get during last season's opener. He was shooting video from the sideline. Players crashed into him, he went down, you can watch the video.

The technical term we use for that in the profession is "one of those things."

Fred's thing, it turns out, is pretty bad. More medical terminology. The collision "did a number" on his knee. He was out of work for months. I know Fred and like him. I talked to him just last week. He asked me about the brace on my elbow. I asked him about his knee. He said he's in pain every day. That's not a good place to be. He's tried to press on. He loves golf and is trying to keep playing. But it's not going to be the same for him.

I didn't play golf last week. Or any week. If I never play golf again, well, I hadn't planned to ever play golf again, so it doesn't matter. It's my gift to golf.

I do have a point or two (or three) to make here. One, Fred's life changed that night at Trinity and not in a good way. Everybody handles that differently. I'd just hope that everybody would take that into account before flaming away, regardless of what you think of this lawsuit.

And second, not every lawsuit that looks frivolous on its surface really is frivolous. I keep hearing people bring up the "hot coffee" lawsuit against McDonald's. The woman who brought that suit had a legitimate case and (rightfully) won it. Study the details of it sometime.

We don't know Fred's motives in this case, whether he needed to file suit to preserve other avenues of action with insurance or worker's comp or whatever. I can't pretend to know.

But I also can't see how it ends well. And it sure as heck has gotten off to a bad start. Let's just say I hope his jury pool (if it ever comes to that) isn't picked from the ranks of current social media commentators.

I could probably go down the row of photographers at any sports event and record a litany of injuries, aches and pains accumulated, more or less, directly from the practice of their profession. Collisions. Back issues. Elbow problems (I will stop whining about this, I promise).

I broke my ankle covering Louisville in the NCAA Tournament in Orlando in 2014. I watched two other sportswriters trip walking down off a riser from a misplaced step. But when I went down a few minutes later, thinking about something else, I stepped wrong, rolled my ankle, face-planted on a camera case and popped back up to what likely was a mild concussion and what definitely was a broken ankle – and not the kind Russ Smith will give you. I hobbled back to the press room. The kind woman working the media food table helped me get a bag of ice. I propped my leg up on a chair, sat at one of the tables and watched the game on TV. The walk to the Louisville locker room after the game was slow and somewhat comical, I have to say.

Once there, Louisville team trainer Fred Hina saw me struggling, examined my ankle and said, "I can't really tell you anything with that much swelling." He put me in a boot made for a basketball player, but that allowed me to move much better and, really, to get home and get it looked at by doctors, beginning the whole worker's comp experience, which I won't go into here.

Bottom line, broken ankle. Lost a good bit of range of motion. Never got it back. It was a long, painful experience.

I guess I could've sued the arena for a bad step. But I knew it was bad. I just got focused on something else and wasn't paying attention when I fell. My company had paid for the worker's comp insurance that covered me. I just didn't feel a need to sue. I never considered it. I wouldn't criticize someone for deciding to. It just didn't feel right for me. It wasn't anybody's fault. Or, more accurately, there was a combination of fault. And I was included.

Same thing when I pulled a near-all-nighter to write a recap of a Rick Pitino book that had been published giving his side of things after his dismissal by Louisville. The ensuing afternoon, I suffered a stroke.

Churchill Downs lead outrider Greg Blasi catches a runaway filly at the start of the 2019 Kentucky Oaks.

Churchill Downs lead outrider Greg Blasi catches a runaway filly at the start of the 2019 Kentucky Oaks.

In the 2019 Kentucky Oaks, a filly stumbled at the start and threw her rider. Churchill Downs lead outrider Greg Blasi raced to catch her against the rail, grabbed her reins and tried to gallop her out. For a split second, they were running straight toward me. I was sitting on the track, below the rail, and really there was nowhere for any of us to go. Now, Blasi wasn't going to let that filly run into anybody, but in that fleeting moment, my thought was, to paraphrase a Jimmy Buffett line: "I'm sitting on the race track. What did I expect to happen? If I get run down, it's my own damn fault."

In the 2011 NCAA Division II Elite Eight, Bellarmine's Nick Holmes threw a pass that broke my laptop. I had to scramble to a Walmart in Springfield, Massachusetts, to buy a cheap replacement that the newspaper would not reimburse me for. Stuff happens.

I'm drifting off topic. I know.

All through the recovery from the broken ankle, one thing I kept thinking was, "What do people who don't have good jobs do when this happens? People who get hurt on the job in factories and then get tossed aside by their employers?"

There are always people who have it much worse.

Either way, sports is a survive-and-advance business. In the end, covering sports are a lot safer than playing them. And a whole lot safer than many situations news reporters often find themselves in.

Everybody on a football sideline knows the risks. In an interview with The Courier Journal shortly after his injury, Fred was quoted as saying, "I've danced around a lot of those, and the odds were against me after 36 years, I guess. ... I'm pretty nimble on my feet, but I hesitated for a second, and that's what got me."

To now read a suit claiming negligence on Trinity's part strikes a lot of us as wrong. A look at the video doesn't help his claim that the sideline was too crowded for him to get out of the way. Fans are poring over it like the Zapruder film.

I feel bad for Fred. But I also feel bad for a lot of media who are going to face new obstacles to high school sports coverage because of this suit. Schools don't have the resources to craft new credential policies, administer them, print the required paperwork, have it legally vetted and all of those other requirements before the start of the season. A lot of them are still short of teachers and even bus drivers. And they always are short of money.

Nobody will be surprised if the Friday night high school highlights — a staple of high school sports TV coverage from around the country — aren't shot from well above the field in the future and away from potential collisions and lawsuits.

It's already started. Franklin County High School football posted this message on its Facebook page today: "Flyer Faithful, in an effort to keep everyone safe in 2022 the sidelines during our home football games will be COMPLETELY CLOSED TO SPECTATORS. The only people who will be allowed field access are those with a sideline pass. There are NO EXCEPTIONS and passes will only be issued to essential members of our team and support personnel. In an attempt to regulate this we will have someone working the sidelines during the game. Anyone who does not have a pass will be asked to leave the team area immediately."

I'm not going to act like it's the end of civilization as we know it. But it's yet another barrier to coverage at a time when both high school sports and TV news need it.

The lesson here is that suing the hand that feeds you is a very difficult game to win.

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Another major sporting event is coming to Louisville. The 2023 ACC Track and Field Indoor Championships will be held at the Norton Healthcare Sports and Learning Center.

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