My farewell to sports writing
When the great sportswriter of another era, Paul Gallico, gave up writing about the fun and games division of life, he reminisced with a book entitled “Farewell to Sport.” I’ll limit my farewell to this space. This will be my final work for The Record after learning recently that I’m one of several victims of corporate downsizing. I spent the last four years doing columns here, an enjoyable and rewarding opportunity to have a voice about local and national happenings in the sports world. Unless something unexpectedly happens, it’s an end to 44 years in the sports writing business, 36 of those writing years in our area and 12 of those here for The Record. Writing about sports is all I ever wanted to do. I got the bug early. My first “published” story was for my elementary school’s newspaper. We didn’t have sport teams at the school, so I wrote about the St. Louis Cardinals trading Ken Boyer to the New York Mets.
That was 1965, but my interest was piqued before that, tracing back to my earliest memories of accompanying my dad for haircuts at a Cohoes barbershop and listening to those gathered there talk exclusively about sports.
It all sounded so interesting. How enjoyable it would be, I thought, to write stories that would elicit that type of conversation.
So, fulfilling that dream professionally for 44 years ... there’s not much to complain about, except the end came a little earlier than I’d prefer. But, what a ride.
I grew up reading about Barry Kramer, Joe Geiger, Armand Reo, Ticky Burden, Charlie Leigh, Ernie Stautner, Billy Harrell, Bill Stafford, all toplevel athletes from our area, and knew I wanted to write about those who followed from local communities.
And, so I did. Except for an eight-year stretch downstate, close enough to New York City to cover more than my share of major league sports.
That enabled me to cover spring training twice, go to the World Series twice, cover hundreds of major league baseball, basketball, football, hockey and, even, soccer games.
I interacted with major athletes back then, from Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose to Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Kareem AbdulJabbar, to Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor, to Mark Messier and Mike Bossy, to Pele and Georgia Chinaglia.
It was more than enough for me to understand that covering sports at that level wasn’t as personally enjoyable or rewarding as is local coverage.
It was, basically, “pack journalism.” One-on-one interviews of any length with athletes was non-existent. Major league athletes view dealing with writers a necessary evil, at best.
It was far different than writing about “local” athletes, ones still unspoiled by notoriety, ones not so “entitled” that they didn’t enjoy being interviewed, recognized and, eventu-
ally, seeing their names in print.
Ours is a minor-league area, at best, for sports. That’s not a bad thing for someone in my profession.
It means that we’ve rarely had to deal with improprieties and scandals. Writing about sports in our market is almost exclusively about writing positive, feelgood articles.
For much of my eight out-of-area years I couldn’t wait to get back to our region and work, again, from my home base.
And, it wasn’t like being here didn’t include watching some high-level, exciting happenings.
A trip to Cooperstown very early in my writing career enabled me to cover the Hall of Fame induction of Mantle and Whitey Ford, and to interview, among others, Ted Williams, Casey Stengel, Satchel Page and Roy Campanella.
I interviewed Jerry West one year when he made an appearance at Linton High School, covered the pre-major league days of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and Ken Griffey Jr., sat courtside for NBA exhibition games that featured nine of the NBA’s all-time best 50 players. I covered at least a dozen of Mike Tyson’s fights. I saw Secretariat, Alydar, Affirmed and Cigar run at Saratoga.
But it was the interaction with those far below major-league level that was most rewarding.
It got no better than Siena’s first trip to the NCAA Tournament in 1989 and watching the
wizardry of point guard Marc Brown direct a first-round upset over Stanford.
Local coverage enabled me to connect with the likes of Don Bassett, Joe Loudis, Bill Carley, Geiger, Kramer and many others.
In my early writing years, in the mid-1970s, I wrote a lot about Catholic Central H.S. basketball and its standout player Bobby Sherlock, and we remain friends 44 years later.
It was just as rewarding to write about athletes you probably never heard about, like Shelly June. She was a standout goalie for the Hudson Valley Community College women’s soccer team back in the mid-1980s. Thirty-some years later we’re both participants in a fantasy baseball league and that long-ago story about her is fondly recalled annually.
I don’t think Reggie Jackson remembers anything I ever wrote about him.
Covering local sports has enabled me to connect and have good relations with more people I respect than I care to count, people like personal favorites Gina Castelli, Paul Hewitt, Mike Deane, Steve Clifford, Brian Beaury, Doc Sauers, Mari Warner, Bob Ford, Al Bagnoli, Mitch Buonaguro, Fran McCaffery, Will Brown, Jim Jabir, Brad McAlester, pre-Duke Mike Krzyzewski, Joe Hogan, Joe and Tony Vellano and Scott Hicks.
If I listed all the athletes I’ve written about and stayed in contact with over many years, there would be a need for a special section of today’s paper.
Most of the names
come from the world of basketball, which became my specialty when I covered local college basketball for a 22-year stretch.
That connection, a few years back, brought my greatest personal honor ... selection to the Upstate New York Basketball Hall of Fame as a media contributor. The annual awards dinner is more like a reunion of dozens, if not hundreds of our area’s best basketball people I have written about over the years.
Those wonderful connections would have never happened were it not for my local writing career.
But, I wrote about more than just basketball. I “rediscovered” lost-to-history baseball great and Cohoes native George Davis, and my series of stories about him helped get him selected to baseball’s Hall of Fame. I tried to do the same with Bill Dahlen of Nelliston, but no success yet there.
I also publicized the Merkle ball, used in one of baseball’s most-famous plays as perpetrated by Troy native Johnny Evers that enabled Evers’ team, the Chicago Cubs, to win the 1906 National League pennant.
That publicity brought the historic ball enough recognition that the Evers family sold it a couple of years later to actor Charlie Sheen for a reported $30,000.
Stories like that, ones that touched on national issues, helped sell newspapers. So did ones about people like Shelly June, or Bobby Sherlock, or thousands of high school and college athletes I had the pleasure of writing about over the years.
I wrote about threesport high school athletes
who also participated in choral groups, about former Siena basketball player Jim Mextorf’s lengthy battle with diabetes that had a positive conclusion when he received a new kidney recently, about how my long-time friend Tom Berkery got through the too-early passing of his wife by attending local sporting events every day.
Those are the humaninterest type stories I look for when I sit down every morning to read three or four newspapers.
Unfortunately, I’m a dying breed. Newspaper sales are down everywhere.
First cable TV and, then, the internet, began giving us news and stories instantaneously, making us far less reliant on the morning newspaper.
Columns, though, bring something different. They provide insight, perspective and opinion. I hoped that difference would have enabled me to keep writing for a few more years.
But, even that didn’t provide immunity to budget cuts that have turned papers everywhere, into shells of what they were when I first started 44 years ago.
I can’t see that changing, even though I still have a notebook full of potential stories I’d like to tell in print.
That means, barring the unexpected, this is my “farewell to sport,” with no regrets other than it came too soon.
It was a good a ride, one I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.