My crowning moment

I can’t believe it’s already been two weeks since David Cook won ‘American Idol.’

The idea that a guy from our area, someone everyone seems to know, is featured in every celebrity gossip magazine is still somewhat unreal for the likes of me.

But having had the pleasure of 10 minutes on the phone with Cook, I can honestly say it could not have happened to a nicer guy.

Before his big homecoming last month and immediately after his victory, I felt like a stalker as I begged everyone with the words “Fox” and “public relations” in their title for a shot at getting an interview with Cook.

I peddled my story to every person I could find. You know the line – “We’re his local paper. We’ve, covered him for 13 years, and our readers want to hear him tell his stories.”

I finished every e-mail or phone call with a zinger – “I just really believe we owe this to our readers.”

And we did.

As much as we’ve covered Cook since 1995, I believed with all of my heart that our readers would  appreciate a chance to read Cook’s take on how growing up in Blue Springs prepared him for his instant fame.

The David Cook story is one our staff never lost passion for. Every week he performed and made it to the next round, made the story even more relevant.

Secretly, I hoped if Cook won ‘American Idol,’ we’d get to be the lucky paper who got an interview with him. And we did.

We weren’t the first media outlet to interview him upon winning, but we got our interview.

Imagine the scene. One journalist sitting at her computer on a random Friday, watching our local ‘Idol’ talk with Jay Leno on YouTube when the ding of her e-mail inbox granted the one interview she’d pleaded to get for a good month.

A frantic rush to the editor’s office and three e-mails to the appropriate PR person (that’s how many times it took to give her the right phone number) later, and I sat at my desk afraid to run to the ladies’ room and risk missing the phone call I’d waited weeks to receive.

Finally, as the office was clearing for lunch, my phone rang, and I knew this was it.

I grabbed my borrowed recorder (because like any good prepared journalist, I left my own recorder at home where I’d used it to record my puppy’s adorable howl – or something equally lame), put my cell on speaker phone and walked toward the conference room, just in time for the call to be dropped – not on my end.

Once we were connected, the PR gal gave me 10 minutes with our hometown star, and all I could think of was making every minute count while not making a complete fool of myself. So I autopiloted in “robo reporter” mode and barely said ‘hi’ before firing into the questions.

If Cook found the interview impersonal or awkward in anyway, he never showed it, and that’s the part of the whole day that still sticks out in my mind.

David Cook was truly humbled by the honor bestowed on him. He refused to take credit for his success on the show and said repeatedly he owed his victory to his fans. And more than once he said he couldn’t wait to come home and thank his hometown fans appropriately.

And his humility wasn’t forced, either. It wasn’t one of those situations where someone was simply telling you what you wanted to hear. Cook really meant it. For a rising star whose romantic endeavors are now all over the gossip magazines and Web sites, Cook was amazingly down to earth about it all.

Some people attribute his genuiness to his Midwest upbringing, and maybe that’s the case. All I know is for a contestant who was often labeled as “arrogant” or “smug” by one judge, Cook carries himself as anything but.

Maybe we could all learn a lesson from David Cook on humility and being a good sport. I know I certainly could, once the interview was over, I ran out of the conference room and did a victory lap around my co-worker’s desk.