How We Found the Kid Who Caught the Ball
Posted: Thursday, August 09, 2007 8:09 AM by Noah Oppenheim
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Noah Oppenheim
This morning we
interviewed Matt Murphy, the young man who caught Barry Bonds' historic homerun ball. For Murphy, being in that stadium, on that night, to catch that ball, was the definition of blind luck. For us, finding Murphy was similarly fortuitous…
From the moment Murphy was escorted from AT&T Park in San Francisco, every talk show in America launched a hunt to track him down. When we’re pursuing a guest like Murphy, one of our go-to sleuths is Matt Zimmerman. If Zimmerman worked in government, we’d have located Bin Laden on Sept. 12th. He’s relentless.
So, if you had to find Murphy, what would you do? Zimmerman and colleagues called every hotel in San Francisco looking for someone checked-in under the name "Murphy". He staked out Murphy’s family home on Long Island. He interrogated the obstetrician who delivered him. But, after hours of looking, we were nowhere. By 8pm last night, we had nearly given up.
The dirty secret of law enforcement, intelligence work, and journalism is that the key to unlocking a case or a story is, more often than not, a tip. Of course, there are things you can do to increase the odds of a good tip. Zimmerman had spread the word throughout the day that he was working on finding Murphy. You never know who might be able to help. At 8pm last night, one of the Zimmerman’s many seeds blossomed.
Stephanie Jones, a publicist for CNBC’s Donnie Deutsch, emailed with a question: “You still looking for the guy who caught the Bonds ball?” Jones, it turns out, is friends with actress Abigail Breslin’s manager. Breslin’s brother, it turns out, is friends with Murphy. A couple phone calls later and Zimmerman was on the phone with Murphy’s attorney. After some gentle cajoling, and the strategic injection of Matt Lauer’s patented charm, Murphy was booked for our show this morning.
Yeah, we got lucky. But as Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
