By Rachel Crader
San Diego Union-Tribune
Bill Dwyre, due to his excellence as a student, was able to leave Notre Dame a few months prior to his graduation in 1966 and begin work at the Des Moines Register as a copy editor on the sports desk.
After nearly five decades dotted with the highest honors journalism has to offer, he said this week that it’s simply time to retire from his full-time position as a LA Times columnist.
At 71 years old he said he’s healthy and not even close to ready to stop writing, but the travel required to work “heavenly” assignments like the British Open and Wimbledon became tiresome. Plus he has a couple grandkids in Baltimore, ages 13 and 11, he figures will only be interested in hanging out with grandpa for a few more years — “You know how that goes.” So he’s going to visit them more and spend more hours playing slot machines in casinos because it’s a favorite activity of his developmentally disabled son, whom he called his “buddy.”
Oh, and he’ll golf, too.
“I’m not one of these people who’s going to retire and not have anything to do,” he said.
Dwyre worked in Des Moines for 2 1/2 years before being moving back home to Wisconsin in 1968 when his father fell ill.
He was hired by the Milwaukee Journal and became the sports editor in 1973 then was hired by the LA Times in 1981, where eventually he was sports editor for 25 years. In 2006, he became a columnist for the Times.
In 1985 he was named the national editor — not sports editor, but editor — of the year by the National Press Foundation for his work covering the Olympics.
“He built the best sports section in the country and did it with a really simple philosophy — it’s hire the best people and let them do what you hired them to do,” said John Cherwa, a former APSE president who was Dwyre’s deputy sports editor for years.
He was sworn in as the Associated Press Sports Editors president in 1988 and in 1996 he was honored by the organization with the Red Smith Award for a lifetime of “major contributions to sports journalism.”
Then he kept contributing for 20 more years.
“He’s the kind of guy that when he walks into a room everybody knows it because he’s been such a part of the LA sports fabric for so long,” Cherwa said. “People that won’t grant interviews will grant one to Bill.”
Dwyre said every sports editor needs patience and curiosity. With those things, good stories can be found. And no matter the generation, the medium or the location, good stories drive good journalism.
“It’s still a story-driven section,” he said, imploring journalists not to get caught up on tweeting and blogging. “It’s still a story-driven world. It’s still journalism. Try to find a way to channel your energy a little bit every day to look for good stories, different stories. Otherwise all the sports section in America will turn into the same thing — advances, columns, features, game stories.
“Yawn.”
Dwyre recounted a recent story he found in Tim Medvetz, a former Hells Angels biker who now carries wounded military veterans to the top of peaks all over the world.
“You think, ‘Boy, I’m going to have lunch with a Hells Angel guy with tattoos all over the place. Boy, that’ll be fun.’ And it was sensational. The guy is articulate, able to express why he’s doing this — it was just a fabulous story. That’s what I will miss, running into those people and being able to write those.”
He even has stories about stories, like the time in 1977 when the Lakers’ Kareem Abdul-Jabar retaliated to rookie Milwaukee Buck Kent Benson’s elbow to his stomach with a punch to Benson’s face. The incident resulted in a broken hand for Abdul-Jabar’s and a broken jaw for Benson.
“I tell that story only because what happened after that journalistically has always fascinated me and I use it as an example,” Dwyre said.
Dwyre, then editor of the Milwaukee journal, was courtside with his Bucks’ beat reporter Jim Cohen when the incident occurred.
“Everybody else stayed at courtside as they threw Kareem out and they took Benson off. Cohen got up and went to the locker room and waited for Kareem, knew that he was going to stay in a hotel nearby and was able to walk with him and get the story. Everybody else was pinned to the security blanket of press row that day. I remember telling Jim, ‘Yeah, you go do that.’ It was his idea. I’ll sit here and handle the rest of the game. I remember that story because his reaction was so perfect in what we ought to do in identifying the real story rather than the obvious story.”
That story contains hints of what Cherwa says made Dwyre a great editor. He empowered his reporters and his deputy editors, then trusted them to do their work.
He had an eye for talent — he hired Rick Reilly to be a back-up reporter on the Angels beat, but Cherwa said Reilly never covered a game because Dwyre saw his talent right away — and the skill to sharpen it. He said that by the end of his tenure as sports editor he mostly let his deputies run the department, but he would called regular meetings and ask a simple question: What story is not on the front page that should be?
“What I was trying to do was teach them to read carefully for something different, to look for a storyline that’s compelling in everything we do, not just in the Dodgers gamers or not just in Kobe Bryant and the Lakers,” he said. “Look deeper than that. And it worked, I made them look. I made them think.”
The list of journalists, including Cherwa and Cohen, who worked for Dwyre before ascending to the top of sports departments and media organizations is extensive.
“He not only taught me a lot about reporting but also managing,” wrote Randy Harvey, the sports editor of the Houston Chronicle who worked for Dwyre as reporter and editor, in an email. “He told those who worked for him that our lives came before our jobs, to make sure we asked for time off for important family birthdays, anniversaries and other special occasions. He ordered one reporter to come home from a road trip to witness the birth of his child. ‘But it’s my second child,’ the reporter said. ‘I was there for the first one.’ Bill laughed. And made the reporter come home. Bill said, ‘Don’t miss any important days for your family, but, on the other hand, don’t ask me for a day off because you have concert tickets.’ I use that line with those who work for me to this day. I was extremely fortunate to have worked for and beside Bill.”
Dwyre, who already has contracts to write multiple articles for magazines in the coming months, said his time as a columnist allowed him to view today’s writers differently than when he was an editor.
“I have watched closely as the pace of technology has kind of prompted the younger writers and writers in general to think that the best way to write a column, to engage your readers, is to rant,” he said. “We have more rants than we have real sports columns, real reported sports columns.
“I’ve noticed that a lot, and I may be dead wrong. I may be an old guy who has not seen the light, but when you use the obvious rant over something — the coach ought to be fired or whatever — you use up too much energy and time that should be used looking for stories of more substance. I’ve seen a lot of that. A lot of column writing is now not so much ‘look at my story’ or ‘read my story’ as it is ‘look at me, look at how clever I am, look at how I can turn a phrase.’ We’re forgetting that this is all about getting it to the reader and letting them read. It’s not about us.”
His message for members of the APSE is to better utilize the collective power of the organization.
“In my day the organization the organization was fiery and gutty, and it may still be,” Dwyre said. “I haven’t been around for a number of years. I’ve kind of backed off of it, but things like press access. I was at a fight on Saturday night. You’re squeezed into the corner, you’re treated not well, and it happens at a lot of events. We’re losing our courtside seats, we’re losing our leverage and I understand it. Television is taking over everything and the Internet is pushing us out too, but I think that APSE needs to revisit the power that it has. If you are running a tournament and APSE says we won’t stand for this kind of courtside configuration, we will not stand for being in the fifth row of the bleachers or the fifth level of the auditorium, it makes a difference, and I don’t think we use our strength or our power enough anymore. I may be wrong, I haven’t been around, but I think all our energy is on tweeting and blogging and it’s wasting us away.”
Still, it’s not difficult to imagine Dwyre bringing in an avalanche of retweets and page views, even if he’d scoff at the idea.
“Bill was a hell of a reporter,” Harvey wrote. “He called me in my room in Barcelona at 2 a.m. one morning during the 1992 Summer Olympics to tell me to get some rest, that I would have to get up early the next morning to cover a press conference and probably spend quite a number of sleepless hours within the next few days covering the Ben Johnson scandal. I still don’t know who tipped him off to that story. He had sources. Imagine today. He would have put that up on Twitter six hours before the press conference and blown up the Internet.”
