Today is Super Bowl Sunday, and I know I should write something about Tom Brady, the great 43-year-old quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers via the New England Patriots, and Patrick Mahomes, the great 25-year-old quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs.
But 8 billion words have already been written and spoken about Super Bowl 55, so I will leave you with my prediction — Chiefs, 35-31 — and write instead about my old Providence Journal colleague, Bill Reynolds.
After almost 40 years full-time at the Journal, 38 in sports, Bill has retired. He had cut back to one column a week 18 months ago, but now, at 75, he is done. And with that, an era in Rhode Island sports has ended. Sports editor Bill Corey announced the news in the Saturday edition, perfect timing because For What It’s Worth, Reynolds’s signature column, was must-reading every Saturday for fans of sports, books, movies and popular culture.
Bill joined the Projo sports department in 1983 after a couple of years on the news side and close to a decade writing freelance features for the Sunday Journal Magazine. Yes, in those days the Journal published a Sunday magazine. He covered the Celtics during the NBA Finals in 1984, flying cross-country for the epic seven-game series with the Lakers. A year later he was writing a column, and I was covering the Celtics.
Bill and I spent a lot of time watching and writing about those great Celtics teams of the 1980s. Battling the traffic on the Southeast Expressway to get to the old Boston Garden on Causeway Street. Catching a plane at T.F. Green for Milwaukee, Detroit, Houston, or Los Angeles during the playoffs. We also spent hours in the cold, dank press box atop Brown Stadium watching the Bears play football, or sitting in the sun in the bleachers at Meade Stadium watching the URI Rams. When they were bad, Bill smiled and left at halftime.
Even when he wasn’t working Bill went to games. Many a Friday or Saturday night during the winter I spotted him in the stands behind the basket at Brown’s Pizzitola Center, catching the Bears against Penn or Princeton or Yale or Harvard and chatting with other old Brown alums. Bill played for Brown in the 1960s. He was a shooter and finished his career just shy of 1,000 points.
I often wondered why Bill went to games when he wasn’t working and finally understood, many years ago, that competition, drama, personalities, players, coaches, fans, atmosphere, everything about sports, attracted him to ball parks and arenas. Many times the games themselves were secondary. And little things he noticed when he wasn’t working a game often sparked an idea for a story or column.
Bill wrote about big-time stars and coaches, and the World Series and the Final Four and the Super Bowl, but he also saw the story in some underdog team that clawed its way into the state high-school basketball tournament, or the kid from a single-parent home who somehow avoided the minefields in a tough neighborhood and made it to college. When it came to finding a good story, Bill didn’t care if it was at Pierce Stadium in East Providence or Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Most of the time he preferred Pierce.
To put it another way, Bill was the writer who gave us books about Rick Pitino but also about Chris Herren, the kid from Fall River who played his way from Durfee High to the world of big-time college basketball, the NBA, and drugs, and lived to tell about it. Or Dave Nyblom, the basketball coach at Hope High in Providence, who took city kids who had nothing and gave them hope.
But it was For What It’s Worth that became Bill’s calling card, the Saturday column that readers loved from Narragansett beaches to Providence bars. Every week he assembled a collage of anecdotes, one-liners, clips and quips from out of town papers, and his own musings on everything from the antics of the Rhode Island General Assembly to the dearth of movies for grown-ups. And there was always the Quiz of the Week — Answer Near The Bottom — and Bunky.
Bill worked hard on that column. After leaving the Journal in 2013, I would try to meet him, and fellow Projo colleague Kevin McNamara, for lunch at Murphy’s, across Fountain Street from the newspaper. Bill was available any day except Friday, when he put FWIW together.
Bill’s departure marks the end of an era for the Providence Journal, for he was the last link to the days when the Journal sports section was a regional powerhouse, a newspaper with a sports staff that featured three columnists and enough writers to cover the Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins and Celtics; Providence College and URI basketball; college football in Rhode Island and New England; Olympics, Summer and Winter; America’s Cup regattas in Newport and Australia; the Triple Crown in horse racing as well as meets at Narragansett Park, Lincoln Downs, Suffolk Downs in East Boston and Rockingham Park in Salem, N.H.; the Masters and the U.S. Open in golf, and high schools all over the state. Journal sports writers had seats in press boxes around the country and at major venues around the world, when necessary.
The Journal covered local golf, tennis, skiing, hunting and fishing. The Sunday Journal contained weekly columns on dogs, horses and cars. And stories appeared in the paper the next day, even when games started late or went into overtime or extra innings. Writers had to file something for the final edition.
Those days are long gone. Today, the Providence Journal is part of the USA Today empire. The sports staff is down to three writers. Game stories, even on PC and URI basketball, often appear in the newspaper a day late. The same is true for professional sports roundups. High school results have all but disappeared.
It’s a different world, baby, as Bill would say. Yes, it is, more so today because the gifted Bill Reynolds has retired. For what it’s worth, I’ll miss him.
