Sports: Newspaper plays big role in bringing big-time sports to Valley.
The Republic played key role in growing pro sports in Valley
The first edition of the Arizona Republican newspaper didn’t contain a sports section, but a sports story did make the front page.
It wasn’t much, just scores from five “lively” games of “base ball” (two words) played across the country the day before, May 18, 1890, including the Toledo Maumees beating the Brooklyn Gladiators, 3-2.
It takes a leap of logic to see that blurb and write, “from the first day of business, 130 years ago, sports were important to the paper.”
So I won’t.
Especially since the ball scores were just below a note about an effort to oust a Pittsburgh judge who “slept a good part of the time” while hearing a case, and just above a paragraph about the death of the wife of an ex-senator from California.
But decades later, the newspaper recognized the power of sports to unite a community and to spur growth. It took a leadership role in the Valley transitioning from a sunny but distant outpost in the sports world to a regular destination for nearly every big sporting event in the country.
Super Bowls. NCAA Final Fours and college football championship games. Allstar games. NASCAR races. The Cactus League. PGA and LPGA tournaments. And on and on.
“There’s no doubt major-league sports really helped build this Valley, in every way,” said Bill Shover, community relations manager for the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. “It brought new energy to people in the Valley.”
Getting the paper on board
Jerry Colangelo was only 28 when he was named general manager for the NBA’s newest expansion team in Phoenix. But he had spent the previous two years helping the expansion Chicago Bulls get off the ground, so Colangelo knew something about what it took to get a city interested in a new team.
Part of that strategy was to get the newspapers on board.
In Chicago, Colangelo shared an office with Ben Bentley, a boxing promoter/hustler/comedian/emcee/public relations man.
“A Damon Runyon-type character,” Colangelo said.
Bentley’s job was to get the media, especially the newspapers, to pay attention to the Bulls.
Sometimes that involved plying them
with whiskey and cigars, Colangelo said.
Colangelo didn’t go that far in Phoenix, but close.
One of the first people he contacted upon arriving in town in 1968 was Shover, who set up a meeting with the managing editors of the two papers.
Colangelo lobbied the editors to pay to send writers on the road with the team. The editors said they couldn’t afford it.
“Which kind of stunned me,” Colangelo said. “I said, ‘look, I’m willing to pay for it. I need to have somebody on the road, and it was accepted.”
That was not uncommon practice in professional sports back then, but Colangelo still laughs that two years later the papers were ready to nix traveling to cover the Suns because of the expense. “What expense?” he said.
(An aside: The newspaper has long paid for reporters’ travel expenses.)
Shover convinced Eugene Pulliam, who owned the Republic and Gazette, that getting behind the new NBA team was good for the community, and for business.
Pulliam agreed.
The paper sponsored a naming contest for the team and helped Colangelo by sponsoring games on Christmas Day.
“We wanted to get spirit in the community because we were such a disparate community,” Shover said. “We come from everywhere. We’re a melting part of the country. Sports unites people and that’s what it did.”
“It’s a one day event”
Shover was working for Pulliam in Indianapolis in late 1962 when Pulliam asked him to move to Phoenix to become community relations manager for the two newspapers. Pulliam’s only marching orders: do good and don’t spend a lot of money in the process.
In the late 1960s, Arizona State football was the most popular sport in town, and there was considerable consternation when the Sun Devils weren’t chosen for bowl games in 1968 and ‘69, making it 19 straight seasons without a bowl appearance.
At a public event one night, school president G. Homer Durham suggested the area should start its own bowl game. Soon after, Republic sports editor and columnist Verne Boatner started lobbying for it in print.
Shover and eight other prominent
“All those major sports were tough to deal with but the NFL was the toughest. They had the golden prize and they knew it.”
Bill Shover Community relations manager for the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette
men in the Valley started to work on it, petitioning the NCAA to approve a new game, which it rarely did in those days.
The group called itself the Greater Phoenix Sports Foundation. It had a nice title but no money.
So when it came time to travel to Washington, D.C., make a presentation to the NCAA, Shover asked Colangelo if the Suns would pay $10,000 or so to cover expenses.
“Why would I do that?” Colangelo said. “I’m trying to get a franchise off the ground. We don’t need another thing.”
“It’s only a one-day event,” Shover said.
But both men knew better. Shover got his $10,000 and the NCAA gave its approval for what later was named the Fiesta Bowl.
The Arizona Eagles?
Before the Cardinals moved to Arizona in 1988, NFL teams were constantly flirting with moving to the Valley, only to remain home when stadium deals were sweetened by nervous government entities and politicians.
There also was an effort to host a Super
Bowl, but it was rebuffed by the NFL because Phoenix was not an NFL city.
“All those major sports were tough to deal with but the NFL was the toughest,” Shover said. “They had the golden prize and they knew it.”
An open NFL market in Phoenix meant leverage for teams looking for better deals on their stadiums.
The Dolphins, Vikings and Colts were among the flirtatious, Shover said.
The most interesting dalliance was with the Eagles in December of 1984. Oddly, if not for Arizona Republic sports columnist Bob Hurt, the Eagles might well have moved to the desert under the cloak of darkness.
Hurt, who died in 2009, had a friendly manner and an Oklahoma drawl. He was instantly likable, and his Rolodex of sources was the envy of other writers.
Needed a quote from, say, North Carolina basketball Dean Smith? Hurt could get it for you.
Around noon on Dec. 10, a Monday, Hurt took a call from a source who said Eagles owner Leonard Tose was ready to move the team to Phoenix. Deep in debt because of a gambling problem, Tose had an investor, Phoenix businessman
James Monaghan, lined up.
Twenty phone calls later, Hurt had five sources confirming the Eagles were prepared to move to Phoenix.
Hurt broke the news on Dec. 11, 1984. The official announcement was scheduled for the 17th, but it was delayed after Hurt’s column.
There was outrage in Philadelphia, but concern, too. Negotiations opened and within a few days, all was settled. The Eagles were staying in Philadelphia.
A Philadelphia writer joked to Hurt that a statue of him should be placed outside Veterans Stadium. Hurt waved that off, saying he preferred to be near the “Rocky” statue by the city’s museum of art.
Good bye to the ‘good old days’
Meanwhile, the Valley continued to grow quickly, and sports kept pace.
In the spring of 1988, Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill announced the team was moving from St. Louis to play at Sun Devil Stadium.
Seven years later, in the spring of 1995, a group headed by Colangelo was awarded a Major League Baseball expansion team. A year later, the Coyotes moved to the Valley from Winnipeg. Today, Phoenix is one of 13 metro markets with teams in all of the Big Four leagues.
In 2000, the Pulliams sold the papers to Gannett.
Times had changed, as they tend to do.
The Valley sports scene was no longer a mom-and-pop operation. Neither was the newspaper.
“There was a time and place where we were partners with the newspaper in all the endeavors in the community,” Colangelo said. “It would be difficult to do today. In some ways, those were the good old days.”