Photo: Jimbo Boyd competes in the 2005 Crim 10 Mile.

It's good to see the Detroit Free Press finally have a Sunday sports section after 17 years of doing without. The joint operating agreement in 1989 that gave the Free Press and News monopoly control of Detroit's daily newspaper business and ad revenue called for the News to publish the Sunday sports section, which was fine with me because I got to write up accounts of the Old Kent/Fifth Third 25K each May and the Crim 10-miler each August.

Last August, Gannett bought the Free Press and the MediaNews Group bought the News, with the understanding the papers would start publishing separate Saturday editions and the Freep would publish the sole Sunday paper, ending the botched mess of jointly-published editions, with each paper responsible for certain sections.

These separate editions came into effect just in time for this year's Fifth Third 25K. For the first time in nearly two decades, a Freep reporter was in Grand Rapids to cover the big event. Now if we can just get him and his editors to realize a 25K is a sporting event, not a feature story that needs to have color dripping off each paragraph.

Let's see, the story early on rightly praised the Hansons' women runners, who did well. But then it segued into the spectators, back-of- the-packers and an interview with one race rookie-clearly pumped up with runner's high-who said it wasn't rain out there, it was God in the heavens. We got the police estimate of the crowds along the way, we got overwriting and underreporting.

And then, near the end of the story, oh, yeah, something else: We were told Fernando Cabada had not only beaten the Africans, there for their usual sort-of-easy payday, but he'd broken the American record set by Ed Eyestone in Indianapolis in 1991. Like it was an afterthought, some way to fill the remaining space in a small news hole.

What! An American wins the race for the second time in nearly forever and breaks the American record, and it's not important enough to get in the lead or anywhere near it?

Argh! Bring back the joint edition!

~~

This is how rumors get started. A tipster called: The same Free Press mentioned above was demanding another $25,000 from Wright & Filippis to host the wheelchair division of this fall's Free Press/Flagstar Bank International Marathon. So he claimed.

After 20-some years of sponsoring the division and paying wheelers generous prize money, often picking up their hotel tabs and giving them travel stipends, poor Wright & Filippis was getting held up at gunpoint.

The company couldn't afford another 25 grand on top of the 25 grand it had been paying out and was being forced to pull out of the event. The wheelchair race, which had seen declining numbers in recent years, was being canceled.

Ooh, that got my hackles up. I was, after all, the one who wrote here a while back that I was worried about what changes might be in store for the marathon now Gannett, known for being tight-fisted, had bought the paper.

I called old friend Jimbo Boyd in Atlanta, where he is a sales rep for Sportaid, a company that sells racing wheelchairs and other adaptive- sports equipment, to get his take. Sportaid's founder, Jimmy Green, won the Freep wheelchair division in 1991. Boyd used to work at W&F and was director of the first official wheelchair division in 1984. He wheeled the race last year, and always comes back to the state for Fifth Third and Crim (though he missed this year's Fifth Third, recovering from shoulder surgery).

Boyd had already heard the bad news. "A heartbreaker, man. I'm sad. It's corporate America. Everthing's changed," he said.

Evil Gannett. Lousy Freep. Poor Tony Filippis, the 90-year-old patriarch of Wright & Filippis, who had supported the race so ably so many years.

Only one problem: Almost none of it was true.

"The Freep did not ask Tony to pay an additional $25K in sponsorship," said race director Pat Ball, under whose leadership the marathon and related events have grown amazingly the last two years, from 6,000 participants to more than 13,000.

The fate of the wheeler division is up in the air, awaiting someone to come to the rescue.

So, what did happen?

According to Mike Murray, W&F director of marketing and communications, the company was offered a chance early this year to partner with Oakland County Parks and Rec this summer to help put on what is planned as the county's first annual summer adaptive sports camp for kids with physical challenges.

Murray said his company had been spending $25,000 a year on the Freep, and hadn't been asked to spend a dollar more by Ball or anyone at the marathon.

"We wanted the wheelchair division to continue, but we had to decide how best to spend our money," said Murray. "It came down to a philosophical issue. We decided it was better to spend our money on a far larger number of kids than it was to spend it on a smaller number of elite athletes.

"We would have continued to sponsor the race, but this opportunity to put on the summer camp came up. We sat down with Pat Ball and she understood."

So, I've calmed myself down. I don't have to honor my vow of never running the marathon again. And I c an get back to training for my first Freep since it finished in Tiger Stadium a few years back. Or more than a few years; I'm afraid to check. A few years is never a few years, these days.

Twenty-six point two, here I come. If the Freep hits 15,000 this year, I want to be one of them. Now if I can just do something about those other rumors going around, that I've gotten older, slower and 20 pounds fatter. MR