Doug Goodman / WPD file

Mitch Albom, host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show and author of the best-selling books “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” said in his Detroit Free Press column Thursday: “You can’t write that something happened that didn’t, even if it’s just who sat in the stands.”

updated 12:41 a.m. ET April 8, 2005

DETROIT - Best-selling author Mitch Albom apologized Thursday to readers of the Detroit Free Press for incorrectly reporting that two former Michigan State players were at Saturday’s NCAA basketball game. He said he wrote the column before the game took place.

Albom said he based the column on what former Michigan State players Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson told him they planned to do. He said he wrote the column in the past tense, as if the events already had happened, because the story had to be filed Friday afternoon — a day before the game — but would appear Sunday.

The column said the players, who are now in the NBA, “sat in the stands, in their MSU clothing, and rooted on their alma mater.” It said Richardson flew in by private plane and that Cleaves flew commercial. The column quoted the players about the differences between life in college and in the NBA.

The Free Press said in a correction Thursday that Cleaves and Richardson were not at the game against North Carolina after all — their plans changed because of scheduling conflicts.

In a letter to readers that appeared on the front page of Friday’s editions, Carole Leigh Hutton, publisher and editor of the Free Press, said the paper is “undertaking a thorough review of the situation,” and would report what it found.

“As a newspaper, our credibility is paramount,” Hutton said in the letter, in which she also noted that Albom “has built an unparalleled reputation in 20 years as a Free Press columnist.”

In a telephone interview Thursday, Hutton said the incident was “a colossal error in judgment that should have been caught before it ever got to the paper.”

“Inexplicably, it didn’t,” she said.

Albom, host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show and author of the best-selling books “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” said in his column Thursday: “You can’t write that something happened that didn’t, even if it’s just who sat in the stands.”

He added: “We — the editors and I — got caught in an assumption that shouldn’t have happened. It won’t again.”

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