A 31-year veteran of Buffalo journalism, I joined the Channel 4 team in March 2020 as a digital data reporter. I’ll be writing mainly about sports, but also doing general features. That’ll appeal to the side of me that aspired to be a Jimmy Breslin-style general columnist when I was younger.
I grew up in Newport, R.I., though I never sailed and came to hate the beach. I was a Red Sox and Providence College basketball fan, listening to games on one of those old transistor radios, and decided I wanted to be a sportscaster. I went to the University of Missouri and soon found my niche as a newspaperman, writing and editing the school paper, serving as sports editor and even delivering it to the printer during my last semester there.
Upon graduation in 1977, I worked at the Binghamton Sun-Bulletin. I quit in 1979, perhaps because I was reading too much Kerouac, then traveled to Los Angeles with some high school friends. I was trying to find myself, but no one had seen me out there.
I returned to Binghamton in 1980, where I worked as a sports columnist and assistant sports editor. Later that year, I jumped to the news side to be a police reporter. I covered all kinds of news stories for the next four years, including education, mental health, government and politics. I once wrote a story about people running for office and their encounters with dogs on the campaign trail.
I quit again to gamble on sports and play basketball, then worked for a year at the Syracuse Herald-Journal from 1985-86 before taking a job at New York Newsday, where I had a national NBA column until 1989. I came to the Buffalo News that year to be a sports columnist and stayed until 2018.
From 1993-2013, I had a regular one-hour radio show on WGR, with a variety of hosts that ranged from Clip Smith to Art Wander to Chuck Dickerson to Schoop and the Bulldog. I also was part of a sports roundtable on Channel 2 with Bucky Gleason for two years.
After the News pulled our columns in an astonishing display of weak management, Bucky and I started a morning radio show in the fall of 2018. He left the following spring, and I did the show with producer Bobby Rosati until I left the show in March 2020.
Channel 4 was kind enough to make me part of their team soon after. I’m excited to be back doing the kind of local reporting and writing that I’ve always loved.
