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The school bus home from Elizabeth Forward Junior High was on Ridge Road approaching the fourth fairway at the Youghiogheny Country Club when my neighbor Dougie turned around in his seat to ask a question.
“Who’s the player they call the ‘Human Bowling Ball'?"
“Uh, Don Nottingham,” I responded.
He asked another obscure question about football immediately after, which I no longer can recall but am certain was answered accurately. He turned back around and chuckled with his seatmate. It took me years to recognize that had been a test, and the prognosis was: Yes, I really was that big a sports geek.
Some who've retired from daily sportswriting explained they were compelled to enter the business because they became enamored of journalism. They watched “All The President’s Men” and determined to pursue reporting as a profession, and sports just happened to have an opening in the department. Many more talked about being drawn to the people in sports, writing those articles because they had universal value and appeal.
As I retire from full-time duty at The Sporting News, in my case it always has been primarily about the sports themselves.
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Yes, I endeavored to assure my practice of journalism was sound and professional through 45 years in the business. Absolutely, the thousands of wonderful people I’ve met through the decades enriched my life and, indeed, the sports in which they were involved. All of it, though, returns to why I entered this business in the first place – and why landing at Sporting News in 1995 was so fortuitous.
This is a publication built on the foundation of sport itself. It began with baseball in 1886, because that was the sport this country had, but gradually it has grown beyond that boundary to encompass virtually all competitive athletic endeavors. This was the ideal place for me to build a career, made so much more rewarding by those running editorial operations, from John Rawlings during my first decade to Benson Taylor in the last, with Jeff D’Alessio, Garry Howard and John Turner in between, and by the absurdly inventive and perpetually pleasant subject editors who’ve directed my coverage. That began with Tom Dienhart, the person most responsible for me arriving at SN, and ends with Bill Trocchi, who seems intent on making it as difficult as possible to leave.
Here I was encouraged to learn as much as possible about the sports I covered and communicate all of it to the publication’s audience, whether in the weekly magazine that was the vehicle when I arrived or the website that now constitutes the core of our operation.
I remember years ago reading a competitor’s article that mentioned the kids’ games that players on a college basketball team concocted in their locker room and immediately recognizing I hadn’t any interest in such tangents. I wanted to tell you how Jim Calhoun’s supernatural eye for talent made UConn great, or how and why Tom Izzo was compelled to convey toughness to his Michigan State teams, or why Mike Krzyzewski’s greatest gift as a coach was the insistence his players communicate on the floor. It was about sport.
I’ve read about prominent musicians who needed something as teenagers to help them cope with loneliness or family issues or to provide an outlet for creative energy, and rock-n-roll became that ideal vehicle. My love of sports meant I never had to search at that age, even though I had plenty about which to be insecure: overweight, socially awkward, an involved but meager athlete.
I was cut from seventh-grade basketball team after finishing last in pretty much every distance run and became the second-worst player on my eighth-grade football team, one of just two identified as “fourth-string”. Nobody got cut from football.
When that team’s coach saw me the following summer playing tennis with some friends, he asked if I’d been lifting to prepare for the ninth-grade season. I said yes, which only was marginally true. He said, “Yeah, lifting the fork at the dinner table.” I got the message a couple years later and dropped all that had been weighing me down, but I was still 5-8.
The big-league dream other kids entertained obviously was unreasonable for me. That turned out to be an advantage, because I figured out how to stay in the game when I wasn’t yet 10 years old. I asked my father if he thought I could become a coach; he told me most coaches are former players. So I discarded that idea and focused on this one.
I read constantly. Aside from those few books assigned in English class, everything involved sports. “Ball Four”, by Jim Bouton. “Me & The Spitter”, from Gaylord Perry, “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load”, the masterpiece on the 1973 Steelers by Roy Blount Jr. – if there was something involving sports I could get my hands on, I was going cover to cover as quickly as possible.
I first subscribed to the monthly Sport magazine in fifth grade, and within two years I started to receive a publication called The Sporting News. If it wasn’t there by Thursday, it was a tough week. The magazines not only provided more reading material, the walls of the bedroom I shared with my younger brother Pat became plastered with cover shots of the great athletes they profiled.
In high school, I would get a library pass each day during study hall periods for a chance to read the Pittsburgh newspapers, the Press and Post-Gazette. When I discovered there was such a thing as sports talk on the radio, I listened nightly to Pittsburgh legends Myron Cope and Stan Savran. I applied to become sports editor of the school newspaper and was blessed to be chosen and taught by a woman named Sallie Hartle, who’d been a reporter before becoming an English teacher and recognized how eager I was to make a career of this.
My future plans were quite obvious. I did well in school and occasionally had teachers ask why I wouldn’t want to do “something more” with my life. My father was like that for a long while, until I won a journalism scholarship to Point Park University. To me, there were no other options. How could I not want to cover sports? A life in sports meant entering the world that rescued and defined my childhood.
And consider where that passion has taken me: to Barcelona for the 1992 Olympics; to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup; to two Great Alaska Shootouts and two Maui Invitationals; to Madison Square Garden for boxing, the Millrose Games, Knicks games, regular-season college basketball and the Big East and Big Ten tournaments; to one-on-one interviews with Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Pete Rose, Bob Mathias and Mario Andretti; to 36 Final Fours, 24 World Championship fights, three college football title games, one NBA Finals, one Stanley Cup Final, one NWSL Championship.
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My final event as a Sporting News columnist truly was a final: Spain v. Argentina to conclude the 2026 FIFA World Cup. When my wife and I conceived our retirement plans a few years ago, that seemed an ideal target date: Why not cover the planet’s biggest sporting event in my last act as a full-time sports journalist?
Soccer had not been one of those sports I studied religiously in my teenage years. In Pittsburgh in the 1970s, we had the Steelers winning four Super Bowls and the Pirates two World Series and Tony Dorsett -- the greatest college football player in the sport’s 157 years – turning Pitt football from a running joke into national champions. We did not have soccer, at all, which was true most places in the U.S. at the time. I came to love soccer years later, getting to enjoy learning that sport in the way I’d come to discover baseball, football and basketball at a much younger age.
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If it seems almost foolish to step away from this wonderful occupation and sublime Sporting News teammates, you probably haven’t had the joy of meeting my wife, Debra. She was a superstar in the business of public relations, and watching her work was an essential ingredient in growing my understanding of how those I was covering operated, or should.
She also has been at home while I traveled so extensively to be on the scene, to witness Carl Lewis breaking the indoor long jump record, watch in awe as Mike Tyson knocked out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds, race against deadline to adequately describe Christian Laettner’s historic buzzer-beater or get my first look at how high school sophomore LeBron James would come to change the sport of basketball.
A while back, I calculated how much of my marriage to Debra passed with me on the road covering these sports I love so much. It’s at about six years now, with our 43rd anniversary approaching in October. Only she can say whether that was a sacrifice, but it’s time to turn more of my attention toward her.
What began at the Tribune-Review in suburban Pittsburgh – my single, overmatched year on the big-league baseball beat that ultimately taught me so much about what I didn’t know – has continued through time at The Pittsburgh Press, The Commercial Appeal of Memphis and The Cincinnati Enquirer.
For so many of those years, I never imagined the possibility of writing regularly for a national audience, which I’ve done now for nearly 31 years at SN. I cannot explain what a privilege that has been. From the days of reader phone calls into the newsroom to e-mail critiques of my columns to the instant (and sometimes brutal) reaction of Twitter, I’ve tried to communicate how much those willing to take the time to read my work mean to me. “Thank you” can feel like an inadequate phrase in such moments as these, but it’s what I have to offer.
I could add another 1,800 words to this by repeating it 900 times, and that still would feel inadequate. And one writing guideline I’ve always attempted to follow is not to repeat the same word or phrase too proximate to the first mention.
What I will say is this is less a goodbye than an explanation for why you’ll see my work less frequently. I plan to continue my work in broadcasting and expect my words still will appear on this site occasionally. Which means I’m not done interacting with the wonderful people at Sporting News, or with those willing to read.
Thank you, again.
I promised I wouldn’t repeat that, but how else does one punctuate the fulfillment of a dream?
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