Two names flashed across my laptop screen last week. You should know something about each of them.
Paul Kenyon wrote about sports for the Providence Journal for 37 years. Buddy Teevens coached football at Dartmouth for 22 years.
Read on, please.
Like most sports writers at The Journal, Paul Kenyon covered everything during the glory days of the sports department from about the late 1970s to the early 2000s. Sports editor Gene Buonaccorsi hired him from the Pawtucket Times because Dick Reynolds, the newspaper’s longtime and beloved chronicler of high school sports, was retiring. Paul accepted Gene’s offer Aug. 11, 1977, the day his son Jayson was born.
Paul’s byline appeared above stories from all over the sports world. He spent 14 years writing about high-school kids and picking All-State teams. He moved on to cover URI basketball, the PawSox, Red Sox, Patriots, Bruins and Celtics. The one constant during his long career was golf — writing a lot better than playing.
Paul Kenyon and golf belong in the same sentence. He wrote with passion, dedication and even affection about the dimpled white ball, the men and women — and boys and girls — who took mighty swings at it, chased it on manicured fairways and lovingly tapped it into a tin cup.
He still considers golf etiquette sacred. Football players clutch and hold, basketball players bang down low, baseball players doctor ball and bat – all to gain an advantage. Not golfers.
“Some people use golf etiquette as a put-down. But in golf you are on your honor at all times,” he told me.
We talked about his love of golf during a brief phone call Sunday afternoon. Strokes in recent years have left him weak and with somewhat limited mobility, but he can still talk golf, and sports writing, with enthusiasm.
“I enjoyed everything I did, but throughout my career the one thing I liked the best was golf, by far,” he said. “The people involved, the way they handled it, whether professionals or amateurs. There are rules you have to follow, and they followed them.”
Paul covered golf greats and golf unknowns. He wrote about Tiger Woods at the 1995 U.S. Amateur at Newport Country Club and Sam Snead at Newport in a senior tournament that was a precursor to the Champions Tour. He covered local stars Billy Andrade and Brad Faxon. He wrote about the Quigley clan — Paul, Dana and Brett. He covered high school girls who went on to college, college guys who excelled at URI and Bryant and the national standouts who showed up at the Northeast Amateur at Wannamoisett every year.
“Two Masters, two Ryder Cups, 13 U.S. Opens, two PGA championships and a host of wonderful amateur events,” he said of the tournaments he covered. He mentioned that he and Bill Reynolds, the ProJo columnist who died this summer, often marveled that they got paid to go to games.
“You have to know what you’re doing in your job, but you have to be lucky. I was at the Providence Journal during the best time to be a sports writer. I couldn’t have been any luckier,” he said.
Paul played golf, but not well.
“You can say without a doubt I was the worst golfer. I stunk. I was lousy,” he said with a chuckle. He played right-handed for six or seven years because lefty clubs were difficult to find. Then one day when he was still working for the Pawtucket Times, somebody asked if he wanted the left-handed clubs used by Sylvester “Ves” Sprague, the executive editor who had recently died. He accepted the gift, but his game did not improve.
Paul and I were colleagues at The Journal until I left in 2013. He followed me out the door about a year later. I can say he is one of those extraordinary individuals who seldom, if ever, uttered a bad word about anybody and always had a smile and cheerful greeting ready. He often wore a golf shirt to work. Everybody liked Paul.
This fall, the Rhode Island Golf Association will induct Paul Kenyon into the RIGA Hall of Fame, a fitting thank you for all the years he delivered the game of golf to readers of The Providence Journal. Paul told me he is not sure he will be able to attend. He’ll have to wait to see how he feels that morning. I hope he and his wife Pauline do go so he can savor the well-deserved standing ovation awaiting them.
Eugene F. Teevens III was more than a coach who won the most football games in Dartmouth College history and five Ivy League championships.
Known to everyone as Buddy, he was the quarterback on Dartmouth’s 1978 Ivy League championship team, the Ivy League player of the year, a member of the Big Green hockey team that finished third in the 1979 Frozen Four in Detroit, and the Class of 1979’s outstanding athlete.
He was a visionary. Alarmed by the dramatic increase in football concussions, in 2010 he eliminated tackling during Dartmouth practices. Skeptics worried that his players would lose their edge, but the opposite occurred. Dartmouth players remained healthy, played better and finished the 2010 season with a 6-4 record, an improvement over their 2-18 record of the previous two seasons. The rest of the Ivies and other schools followed his precedent.
He was an innovator. Working with Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, he helped develop the Mobile Virtual Player, a robotic tackling dummy that can move as fast as 20 miles per hour and mimic the feints and cuts of a ball carrier. It debuted in 2015, and today is used by many colleges and NFL teams.
He was a risk-taker. In 2018 he hired Callie Brownson as offensive quality control coach, the first woman on a Division I coaching staff. When she left, he replaced her with Jennifer King. Both women are now coaching in the NFL.
He was a teacher, the football field his classroom, Dartmouth athletics director Mike Harrity said. His most important lessons were not Xs and Os but to live life, to care for others, to do the right thing.
Best of all, Buddy Teevens was a good man. Whether an assistant coach at Boston University, Indiana and Illinois, head coach at Maine, Tulane, Stanford and twice at Dartmouth, he treated people with respect. He made those around him better. Tributes that poured forth after his death on Sept. 19 underscored that point. Admirers used words like humble, integrity, humility, dignity, loyalty, thoughtful, admiration and special to describe him. Harvard football coach Tim Murphy, a close friend for 55 years, described Buddy as Superman.
Teevens died from injuries he suffered March 16 when a Ford F150 pickup hit him while he and his wife Kirsten were pedaling home to their vacation house in St. Augustine, Fla., after having had dinner. Surgeons amputated his right leg after the accident and in the ensuing months doctors treated him for injuries to his spinal cord. Kirsten and he eventually moved to Boston to be closer to medical care and family. He grew up in suburban Pembroke with eight brothers and sisters.
An experienced cyclist — he once pedaled across the U.S. and raised $12,000 for cancer research — he was riding perpendicular to traffic on State Road A1A, not in a crossing area and not wearing a helmet or reflective clothing when the accident occurred, according to the police report published by the Valley News of Lebanon, N.H.
Teevens coached at Dartmouth from 1987-1991 and 2005-2022. He compiled a record of 117-101-2 and was the New England Coach of the Year three times and Ivy League COY twice. I wrote about him and his team while covering Brown football for the Providence Journal. He was always cordial.
I saw Buddy in January at the Hanover Inn on campus. He was smiling while mingling with football players and parents on the last morning of a recruiting weekend. He was busy — and I was in a hurry to check out and hit the road for home — so I did not interrupt to say hello. Now I wish I had.
Buddy Teevens would have turned 67 on Oct. 1. Besides his wife, he leaves two children, four grandchildren, his mother and siblings. Condolences to them all, and to the Dartmouth family. Last Saturday the Big Green defeated Lehigh, 34-17, at Memorial Field. That evening, according to Dartmouth, about 400 family, friends, students, athletes and administrators, many holding candles, gathered on the college green to share memories of a most special man.
Mike Szostak can be reached at mszostak@thepublicsradio.org.
