How a Legendary Sportswriter Found a New Home Team

Some people seek out new places and new experiences in retirement, but you and Cheryl moved to a small town near where you grew up. What led you to do that?

As a journalist, I had a charmed life. I got to do everything I ever wanted as a newspaperman. I literally had been around the world, so I had nowhere to go but home. It was natural. My wife and I had both grown up in Atlanta, Illinois, near where we settled down. It was like a 50-year road trip, so let’s close the circle and go home.

How differently did your retirement turn out compared to what you had envisioned?

What turned out was that I was a writer, and writers write. I actually had no plans to quit writing, but I didn’t know what I would write when we came home. But then, through a family and friend connection, I went to a girls high school basketball game. And I discovered that I couldn’t sit there and not take notes. I had to write something about it. So I began to do that. I’ve done it now for 13 seasons.  

You started out at a small paper decades ago, writing about local teams. Is there something beneficial about returning to your roots in retirement?

I think there’s great value in it. You don’t really come to appreciate what created you until you go back and see it again and remember, OK, so here’s what I learned at the time and what led me to believe this or decide that. I think it’s good to revisit the causes and events that shaped your life and learn from them again, because we’re always needing to learn something else.

What keeps you at the keyboard after all these years?

Writing feels like such a part of me that every day, it’s almost like breathing. There’s a sense of purpose to it. You’re trying to tell people about something they might enjoy, trying to entertain and inform. I wasn’t ready to quit being that guy, so I found a subject that intrigued me.

I’ve probably written 500,000 words about the Lady Potters. That’s more about those girls than I wrote about Muhammad Ali, and I covered him for 50 years. When I went to that game, I’d never seen high school girls basketball. The Lady Potters had won that night, but I didn’t know if they were any good. It turned out that they were, but I didn’t write about them because they were state champions. They were interesting to me. Every game, I see something I’ve never seen before, whether it’s a girl making nine 3-pointers in a game or a father carrying his injured daughter to the locker room.

I went to every game, and my wife went with me. We sat and watched. We’d ride home in the car and talk about it, and I’d write a story and put it up on the website. I didn’t know if anybody would ever read it, but I didn’t care. It was writing. 

You’ve said that covering the Lady Potters helped you to cope with your wife’s illness. How?

She was in a nursing home for 5½ years, a noncommunicative invalid. And all that time, I was going to girls basketball games, and I was telling her about them. It made me realize why I was going to these games and writing about them. That’s who I was as a kid, growing up with that girl. I loved her when she was 17, and I loved her in the nursing home. It was very important to me to keep that connection. 

It also was a blessing, because I found people at those games — mothers, fathers, grandmothers, all the people who knew what was going on with me and my wife. They cared about me, and I cared about them. It was a community I never had as a big-time professional sportswriter.

You spent a lot of years covering some of the world’s most famous athletes. How different was it writing about these young basketball players?

When I was a newspaper columnist, I was trying to be fair to both sides. Even if I was focused on Muhammad Ali, I would still write about Joe Frazier being a great fighter. I never wanted to be identified as a fan of a team or a guy I was writing about. But with this girls basketball team, that’s what I am. There’s a certain freedom to being a fan. 

What’s different is the skill level. With Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan or Pete Rose, you’re judging them against possibilities, against immortality. With girls basketball, you’re judging them against themselves. They’re still reaching to be as good as they can be. I’ve seen great athletes do things that are impossible to believe, but I’ve also seen the girls exceed what you think is possible for them. It’s still thrilling and inspiring.

Do you think you’ll ever actually put away your laptop and retire?

No, I have no plans to ever quit writing about what I know. During the first year of the pandemic, I wrote columns every day on Facebook, 337 days in a row, just documenting the times in my mind. I can’t imagine a life without writing.