Where do I begin to describe Bill Reynolds, the beloved sports columnist for The Providence Journal and a colleague for 33 years, who died Thursday morning?
With his wildly popular Saturday column “For What It’s Worth,” a collection of bullet-point musings on everything from the PC-URI basketball rivalry to the state of the Red Sox to the latest novel that kept him turning pages?
With his books on basketball coach Rick Pitino when he was riding high; local basketball star Chris Herren when he was sinking low into drug abuse and then rising above it; a season with the Hope High School boys basketball team?
No, I would begin with Bill, still lean and lanky from years of playing basketball, pushing back from his desk in the Journal sports department — a desk littered with newspapers, books, notebooks, scraps of paper scrawled with messages and phone numbers — for a timeout with people dropping by for a chat. It could be anybody, really — political columnist M. Charles Bakst, State House reporter Scott Mackay, columnist Bob Kerr, office assistant Bobby McGarry, crime reporter Bill Malinowski, even publisher Howard Sutton on occasion.
No matter how busy he was, how important the story or column he was working on, Bill always took the time to listen, to ask questions, to show his interest.
He was the same on the outside. Bill could have covered Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours, NBA Finals —the BIG stories of the day — all the time, but he preferred local color. The high-school senior playing his last football game on Thanksgiving morning is the kind of story he relished. And no wonder. He was a small-town guy who loved his small state. He could have left but never did.
When it came to basketball, nobody wrote it better.
Bill had played the game at Barrington High, Worcester Academy and Brown University. He knew hoops inside and out. He was good enough at Brown to score 909 points, crack the Top 10 all-time scoring list, and forever be known as Shooter.
Hanging around a gym, watching a game or practice, talking to an unheralded player and then crafting a riveting column was the juice that drove Bill for so many years. He was content to leave the Super Bowl to others.
“Bill Reynolds’ interest and coverage of our basketball program at St. Andrew’s was legendary. He was extremely supportive and helped us help kids. His articles on our kids were accurate and professional and he gave the public an insight in what actual happens at a prep school. He was a valuable cog in the St. Andrew’s basketball machine,” Mike Hart, athletics director and boys basketball coach at St. Andrew’s in Barrington wrote in an email.
“I’ll never forget the friendship and valued input from Bill throughout the years. Bill not only knew basketball but he knew people well. He will go down as one of the most important people in the world of basketball and should be considered for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame,” Hart said.
During the mid-1980s heyday of the Larry Bird-Robert Parish-Kevin McHale Boston Celtics, Bill and I spent hours together pushing through rush-hour traffic on the Southeast Expressway to get to Boston Garden, or flying to Detroit, Milwaukee, Houston, Los Angeles for playoff games. He didn’t like to drive so I was always behind the wheel in those stop-and-go jams.
I never told him so, but I cherished those moments together because we could just talk. Story ideas, family, the ProJo, opportunity, life.
Experiences? There was the playoff game where we had to huddle under the makeshift press table to file our stories because fans were throwing stuff at us when they learned we were from Boston. And there was the scare when something was wrong with the landing gear on our plane. As we floated toward the runway for an emergency landing, we assumed the crash position and looked at each other as if to say, “Is this it?” Thankfully, it wasn’t.
Reynolds was a mentor.
Amanda Milkovits met Bill in 2001. She was a new young reporter at the Journal. We reminisced this week.
“I talked to him for the very first time on Thanksgiving Day. I was in the lunch room. I was the only person there, except for Bill,” she told me. He chatted her up and made her feel welcome. In time, she started writing her police beat stories at a desk in the sports department because it was quiet. Bill was always there, and they became friends.
“He was just so kind and smart and funny and just . . . I regret he got sick because there are so many things I want to tell him. He was a mentor to me. He was the journalism professor I never had, the mentor I was looking for.”
She recalled a story she did on South Providence kids. She invited them to the newsroom and then took them to a conference room in the sports department. They spotted Bill and one cried, “There’s the legend!”
“They started hugging him,” she said.
Bill convinced her to go to Providence College games, and occasionally they would meet at Murphy’s on Fountain Street before the game.
“These huge men would come over and start talking to him. They were all over him like puppies. He had written about them, and he remembered them. He knew everybody. He knew not just your name, but he knew about you,” she said.
“I knew nothing about sports. I didn’t care. He got me to try PC games. He had season tickets and would give them to me. I’d take Mary Murphy (ProJo photographer) and we’d talk the whole game. Now, I’m obsessed. I can see what he was talking about. The players, the movement. I’ll always thank Bill for that,” she told me.
When Amanda received an offer to join the Rhode Island staff of The Boston Globe, Bill was the first person she told.
Bill developed a deep friendship with a few of his subjects.
“I first met Bill when I was a sophomore, probably 15 years old,” Georgetown basketball coach and former Providence College coach Ed Cooley told me Thursday. “He and Paul Kenyon covered us when I was at Central High School. From that time Bill and I established a close relationship through high school and prep school and college and throughout my coaching career. He gave me an opportunity at an early age to be recognized.”
Cooley credited Bill for helping him revive Providence College basketball.
“He gave everybody a chance without judging. He gave you a chance to fail without pointing out the obvious. Little by little his articles helped. He deserves a lot of credit for helping us build that program. He gave the players, coaches and administrators the opportunity to build the program just by getting behind the Friars,” Cooley said.
“I have a deep amount of respect for the way he covered not only Providence College basketball but basketball at all levels. He gave everybody an opportunity. I don’t know if he ever said anything negative. He was never, ‘I got you.’
“Bill is in the Hall of Fame in my book. He came to my graduation at Stonehill! What kind of people do that? That’s profound. I’m sitting here with tears in my eyes. Thank you, Bill.”
His later years and his legacy.
Bill Reynolds wrote four times a week into his 70s. Whenever I asked about retiring, he would take off his glasses, twist his face into his crazy grin and say, “Mike, as long was they don’t ask me to go to Boston for the Celtics or Red Sox, or to Foxboro for the Patriots, as long as they let me do what I’m doing, why should I Ieave?”
He started to slow down in 2019 and cut back to his Saturday “For What It’s Worth.” He wrote his last column in 2021. By then, his health was failing. He became forgetful and eventually moved to an assisted living facility. He was 78 when he died.
Bill never had children of his own. He is survived by his partner of 37 years, ProJo alum Liz Abbott.
“I always felt all the kids he wrote about all those years were his kids,” Amanda Milkovits said. “I feel fortunate to have had his attention. To have him want to know you was really special. He was like your favorite uncle. He wanted to know about you as a human being.”
I have no doubt the rest of us who knew Bill Reynolds feel the same.
Mike Szostak can be reached at mszostak@thepublicsradio.org.
