In the Spotlight

Any night, the phone will ring. It’s that time of the year. It’s a spring training tradition. Though with each passing year, the phone call seems to come earlier in the evening, with less background noise and less evidence of the callers being ambitiously served.

I had the great fortune throughout my journalism career to cover many historically black college athletic programs. I say “great fortune” because I found over the years that nowhere is a reporter’s work better appreciated, nowhere is a writer’s access to subject matter greater, and nowhere is there more fertile ground for producing good copy.

From NSMA Hall of Famer Bob Ryan, special to NationalSportsMedia.org.

I knew little or nothing — no, absolutely nothing — about Salisbury, N.C., in my youth. Like a lot of other people (damn Yankees) living hundreds or thousands of miles from there, the extent of my knowledge about the entire state of North Carolina was minimal and stereotypical: tobacco, basketball, Andy Griffith.

He never cared much for the new computer technology, and, as he aged, acute arthritis came between him and his typewriter. Because of this last, for the last 30 years of life, Sam wrote his weekly sports column for the Baltimore-based Afro-American in longhand on a plain paper tablet.

Recently, I found myself sounding like a grumpy old man – imagine that -- railing against two proposed rules changes in sports.

Mark McCarter discusses the burden of Atlanta fandom.

Kyle Shanahan’s backpack was missing. Inside was the game plan for Super Bowl LI. All’s well that ends well, but you know what the conspiratorial thinkers among us were thinking.

We meet every few months at Foley’s pub in Manhattan. My friends have new hips and new knees and one of them has a new shoulder – “diving for a loose ball in practice,” Lew Freifeld explains. That was half a century ago.