We chroniclers of life in Sports World do not often enjoy the opportunity to write or speak about our own before they pass on to the Great Press Box in the Sky. With that in mind, I’m delighted to share a few thoughts about Bill Reynolds, my colleague in the sports department at The Providence Journal for 30 years.
Bill, a fixture in the Projo sports pages since 1984, announced in his column on Wednesday that he is cutting back to one day a week, his immensely popular and must-read Saturday column, For What It’s Worth. His reason? He is 74, and he’s tired.
I get it. I ran out of gas six years ago, and I was only 63 when I left The Journal.
For most of his career Bill Reynolds was the best sports writer, and later columnist, in Rhode Island, and one of the best in New England. He has the awards, certificates and citations to prove it.
But unlike many stars in our business, Bill’s ego never got in the way of his talent. He was content to linger at the back of the media pack interviewing the star of the game. He listened for the phrase or two that he needed to give his column a different twist. He looked for the oddity that everyone else missed. A small example: during post-game interviews, Dennis Johnson, the late, great Celtics point guard of the mid-1980s, put his left sock on before any other clothing. Every time, Bill told me once.
I covered the Celtics during the original Big Three Era of Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale. During the playoffs Bill rode shotgun while I battled traffic on the Southeast Expressway to get to Boston Garden. He marveled at how many Mike and Ike candies I consumed on the round trip. I marveled at how he turned book ideas into books.
We traveled together as the Celtics played their way to the NBA Finals in the mid-‘80s. Two incidents stand out. Returning from Milwaukee the morning after a victory over the Bucks, our flight had to make an emergency stop – in Detroit, if I recall correctly – because of a faulty landing gear. The cabin crew instructed us to assume the head-down-and-forward crash position. We glanced at each other as if to say, “Is this it?” Fortunately, the landing gear held, but the emergency vehicles lining the runway underscored the potential disaster we had just averted.
Then there was the night in Houston during the 1986 Finals. Jerry Sichting, the Celtics 6-1 guard, and Ralph Sampson, the Rockets 7-4 center, got in a fight that sparked a bench-clearing brawl. The crowd got into it and started throwing things. Our press seats were in the stands, and we started getting pelted from above. I had to crouch beneath the press table to file my story on deadline.
Bill would travel great lengths in search of a good story. He went to the Deep South for a long piece on the Red Sox pitcher Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd. When the URI football team was flying high in 1985, he joined me in Bethlehem, Pa., for a Saturday afternoon game between URI and Lehigh and then drove to West Point, N.Y., for a night game at Army.
Bill could write about any sport, but basketball was, and remains, his first love. He played on a championship team at Barrington High, and after a year at Worcester Academy he played for Brown. As a senior in 1968 he led the Bears with a 15.4 scoring average. He finished his three-year varsity career with 909 points and played pickup basketball until just a few years ago. He jokes that he played more games in long-gone Marvel Gym than anyone.
Bill has a million basketball stories, but my favorite is from his days at Brown. Jimmy Walker, the star guard for Providence College and originator of the between-the-legs dribble, was the best player in college basketball in 1967. During a game against Brown, he was unstoppable, as usual. Bill was on the bench with four fouls when coach Stan Ward ordered him back in to cover Walker. Not wanting to be embarrassed further, Bill immediately fouled Walker and fouled out. Ward was furious..
Bill was at his best describing the unsung heroes and the little guys of Sports World. He was more likely to write about the challenges confronting an inner-city high-school kid than those facing an NBA MVP. He tackled issues of race, culture and drugs in sports in his columns and in some of his dozen or so books.
Without fanfare, Bill also mentored high-school students who wanted to become writers and basketball players who wanted to become better shooters.
But Bill is best-known for his Saturday column, For What It’s Worth, a compilation of one-liners about everything from sports to music to books to movies to politics to catchy phrases from New York newspapers to growing old in a social media world.
For What It’s Worth has been “must reading” for decades. When I was still writing for the Projo, every so often someone would compliment me on the Saturday column and the books I recommended. After a polite pause, I always replied, “Sorry, you’re thinking of Bill Reynolds and For What It’s Worth.”
Sports World has changed, and not always for the better, in the years since Bill and I worked together. His musings in For What It’s Worth have remained constant, however, and will continue. For that I am glad.
