In sports journalism, at least in my opinion, narratives are overused. A player goes from rags to riches here, overcomes initial failure to triumph over adversity there, and achieves his childhood dreams to reach the pinnacle at the end of seasons everywhere. Every sportswriter is guilty of it, and a primary goal of a long-form site like Grantland.com is to devote their resources and manpower to find stories off the beaten track. 

This past week, Grantland and investigative sports journalism delved into unfamiliar territory. The Jerry Sandusky, Biogenesis and Michael Vick dogfighting scandals, for example, rocked their sport to the core. But in those cases, the reporting uncovered a heinous misdeed and exposed those trying to cover up their actions. Last week, investigative reporting took a nasty fork in the road. It got invasive.

A story on Grantland about Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the creator of a revolutionary golf putter, gained buzz after it posthumously outed "Dr. V" as transgender. Vanderbilt committed suicide three months ago, and her ex-girlfriend blamed the story "90 percent" for the timing of her death. When story author Caleb Hannan initially approached Vanderbilt to talk about her Oracle GX1 putter, which revolutionized with its design and responsiveness, she asked that his story "talk about the science, not the scientist." That didn't happen.

SEE ALSO: After Dr. V: Transgender Is No Con

Hannan did his due diligence on the golf aspect of the story. He researched the club, and took leads as they came to delve more into the source of Dr. V's invention. As that happened, the investigation to find out more about the club turned into the discovery that Vanderbilt lied about her Wharton MBA and MIT degrees. I would have been OK with Hannan revealing that, as it adds to the mystery of how one woman not involved in the golfing world invented a "magic" putter. It discredited her, but given that she made up her credentials in the first place, that's fair game. But then, through a tip and some document-sleuthing, he found out Dr. V had once been a man.

A woman invents a golf club, lies about her education and past employment in the military sector to sell said club, then turns out to have changed her gender along the way. The last detail is the juiciest in Hannan's eyes, but is also the one not germane to the story. Hannan found the rare storyline without precedent, the equivalent of striking oil for an aspiring reporter. He pounced on it. 

Hannan's story should have never been published. It doesn't matter that he didn't explicitly threaten to out Vanderbilt against her will, but the mere fact that he pushed her to think so despite the detail not adding to the story is wrong. In Grantland editor Bill Simmons' letter responding to the article, he says Grantland never considered running the piece before Hannan's correspondence with Dr. V turned sour. Only after her death did they decide to put it out. It wasn't worth it. 

The challenges faced by transgender people are complicated, and ones that I'm by no means qualified to talk specifics on. But using that fact as a "plot twist" in the narrative of your article, after the details necessary to defame her are already in play, is simply wrong. ESPN Ombudsman Robert Lipsyte put it well when he suggested that Hannan did not do the necessary research to know the traumatic effect outing someone who is transgender can have. "At the least, he [Hannan] should have reached out to his LBGT colleagues at ESPN, if not to outside individuals and groups, for greater understanding of a community of which he apparently knew nothing," Lipsyte wrote on Monday. 

Stories can make or break careers for an aspiring reporter. Look at Jack Dickey, who helped break the Manti Te'o dead girlfriend hoax last year and went from Columbia undergrad to a job with TIME and Sports Illustrated. Sports reporting is a tough business, with countless more aspiring writers than actual positions in the industry. Hannan didn't want his eight months of pursuit to go to waste, and I can't blame him. But getting ahead is no excuse to cross boundaries. In Hannan's case, it was the worst excuse; it put his journalistic morals in the back seat. 

Hannan did most of the long-form process right. He found a story no one else had thought of, pursued it to get information about Dr. V, and found a fraudulent inventor who lied her way to the top. Maybe he thought that was just another American tragedy, a Gatsby-esque false livelihood. Maybe he knew there was more and wouldn't stop until all was revealed. Either way, he struck a nerve in the already fragile topic of his piece, and the rest leads up to today's debate. Sports reporting is invaluable, but as Hannan shows us, there is a line, and it can be crossed. The new goal: don't let it happen again.

Reach Senior Sports Editor Jacob Freedman here or follow him here.