Stories From North Carolina

There are three guarantees when you attend the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Awards program in Salisbury, North Carolina.
You’ll experience the best in Southern hospitality, you’ll never go hungry and the conversation will always center on sports.

I’m just back after a long weekend in which I was able to catch up with old friends, make new ones and listen to a years worth of stories in a little more than 48 hours. The 48th Annual Awards program honored sportscasters and sportswriters from each state as well as this year’s National recipients….Joe Buck from Fox Sports and Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated. In addition inducted into the NSSA Hall of Fame were CBS sportscaster Verne Lundquist and sportswriter Dave Kindred, best known for his work in The Sporting News and Golf Digest.

What I like most about the annual event is no matter what’s going on in the world when you get a bunch of sportswriters and sportscasters in the same room then the talk will no doubt be about sports. I heard Joe Gross of Annapolis, Maryland tell America’s Cup sailing stories about Ted Turner…Hal McCoy of Dayton, Ohio always has a couple of baseball classics, I spent half an hour listening to sports author Tom Callahan talk about Johnny Unitas and Lindquist told some beauties about Terry Bradshaw and his figure skating analyst Scott Hamilton, who was his presenter at Monday’s Awards banquet. As he usually does, Reilly stole the show during his acceptance speech and he’s had plenty of practice.
This marked the 11th time he was honored as the National Sportswriter of the Year and while he’s best known for his back-page column each week in “Sports Illustrated” Reilly is also a terrific author. His newest book “Hate Mail from Cheerleaders” just came out yesterday and he and I shared some interesting stories about the subject.

I will also tell you that when anyone found out I was from New Jersey they would bring up Rutgers and want to talk about the success of the Football and Women’s Basketball programs. And as always when they saw Toms River next to my name, a couple of people asked if that’s the place that had those good Little League teams. Some things never change.