What Did He Say?

Let's say that you're a reporter for that covers the Flyers for one of the papers in Philly (are there any left besides the DN and the Inq?). You are having one of your typical post practice hallway chats with Flyer forward Simon Gagne, and he give you a great qoute. He says, verbatum, "I think that Johnny only giving me ten shift a game suck ball." Holy smokes! Right? Talk about a quote that is going to get your story read and your name out there. You just hit the jackpot!

So you go back to your cubicle to write the story. You load up on coffee, put on your headphones to drown out the annoying voices of your office mates, and start crack-a-lacking. You come up with a great headline and a better lead, and then it's time to drop the qoute bomb on the public. Do you write:

a) "I think that Johnny only giving me ten shift a game suck ball."

or

b) "I think that Johnny only giving me ten shifts a game suck balls."

Choice A is what Gagne actually said, word for word, but choice B is gramatically correct. If he said he thought he had done good last game you wouldn't correct the "good" to read "well" would you? Is this different?

This type of scenario occurs much more often in other sports, and the dilemma actually occured to me when I was reading a copy of Blender (which I don't even know how I started receiving or if I'm paying for it) and whoever was conducting the interview was obviously taking ever nuance of every word The Game said and trying to capture that in print. Mispellings, slang, curses, making sure to replace the "g" at the end of "ing" with an apostrophe. I felt like the game was talking to me. Right there on the toilet!

But this is a more suddle form of a journalist's decision to write what was said or write what the person meant to say, assuming they would like to speak English properly? Is adding an "s" racist? Or is it just good journalism?