LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- There is a moment, at least four days a week, that has become as much a ritual I share with my friend and colleague Rick Bozich as any. We finish taping our Sports Page segment for WDRB News in the afternoon and then we take turns guessing how long the segment was.
Closest to the mark wins. Sometimes it's me. Sometimes it's him. There are no formal records. Though, if one of us gets on a streak, the other knows about it.
Right now, Rick is on a streak.
Rick will be inducted into yet another Hall of Fame tonight in Freedom Hall, the Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame. He's already been inducted into the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame.
I've written enough tributes to him that I'm down to sharing minutiae. I've told him if he gets into another Hall of Fame — which is quite likely — he's on his own. If you know Rick, you know he's incredibly grateful for the honors but also has had it up to here with the attention, with being the story.
So it's a few illustrative moments I'll share on this Hall of Fame day. It wasn't long after we made the move to WDRB and television that Rick instituted the ritual of guessing our segment time. Rick wants to win. He's generous and gracious when he doesn't, at least with his friends and teammates. But he wants to win.
So it was a natural thing to turn a daily exercise into a game. What we are doing is not showing up for work at a steel mill (which he has done) or showing up to load trucks with a forklift (which I have done).
When I began my journalism career answering phones in The Courier-Journal sports department in 1992, Bozich had already been a sports columnist at the paper for 14 years. He was always on the go, to Super Bowls, the World Series, the Final Four, the Olympics. I knew him in those years but didn't really get to know him until I came back to the paper in 2000 to cover University of Louisville sports.
For a long time, decades, his main concern (and mine) was to write the words that people would wake up to in the morning over breakfast. That was it. How to tell this one story, on this one day, in the most compelling, artful way he could manage. If there were challenges, they were the pressures of deadlines or the requirements of travel or the ever-evolving series of contraptions he wrote on and tried to send into the station with.
(Anyone who has had to scout out a high school for a nearby pay phone or a free office phone at night to send back a story with your Radio Shack word processor and a set of couplers will understand.)
It was a more elegant world, with an office manager who handled travel reservations and other needs.
What has struck me about Rick in all the years since then, and for most that I have known him well, is his ability to adapt to the times, and the business, as it changed.
The newspaper set me up with something called a blog in 2005. Soon, both of us had added blog entries to our column writing duties. By the time we left the newspaper, his blog was generating in the neighborhood of 5 million page views a year by itself on top of his newspaper columns.
His daily work ethic and inexhaustible interest in various sports topics made him a natural for the blog. When the newspaper started to ask for video, he was the first to buy his own small video recorder. He bought an Apple laptop to work on before I did. We began a weekly webcast. I don't know if anyone was watching, but we sure recorded a lot of stuff.
I don't recall him ever complaining about these changes. He just made them, embraced them, in fact, in many instances. We felt the strain of the work, of the growing 24-hours-a-day, seven-day-a-week, always-on-call grind that it was becoming with the advent of social media and online journalism. But his willingness to make those major shifts gracefully made an impact on me, and I'm grateful they did.
I know he also felt the strain of the changes in the newspaper business. He saw the hundreds of years of experience that were being ushered out of the building in favor of younger, less-expensive talent. We both figured it was only a matter of time before our numbers came up.
It was about then, in the winter of 2012, we were approached by WDRB news director Barry Fulmer about making a change. To my surprise, Rick was incredibly open to it. It was Rick, a devoted fan of Seinfeld, who dubbed the TV station "Vandelay Industries" when we would have discussions about it at the newspaper.
I don't suspect I know how hard it was for Rick to make that change. When you write for that long for a newspaper, it becomes part of your identity. But, in his mind, the move to WDRB was a necessary move that created new opportunity. And the kindness and support of the leadership and newsroom — from Fulmer to Bill Lamb and Jennifer Keeney to all of the people who have worked in sports and new — made the move easier.
I remember, shortly after we informed the newspaper leadership of the move, the moment he and I were talking on our cellphones and the lines went dead. We've laughed about that ever since. I remember the evening that a colleague basically helped us sneak back into the newspaper building to help us haul the rest of the junk in our offices out of the building, via a freight elevator. For me, it was just a humorous situation.
But I imagined that, for him, there was more emotion than he shared. There were no farewell columns. Rick spent 30 years of his life in that C-J office, and we've not been back since.
At the time, not a few people thought the move was crazy. The Sunday circulation of The Courier-Journal was still around 225,000. As the years have passed, more have come to accept the wisdom of the move.
Rick's first two significant TV stories won Emmy Awards. Again, he made the move gracefully.
Today, our work on video is worth more from a revenue standpoint than the words we write. That's been a hard truth to wrap our heads around. We're on TV live before games. We're taping video after games. We're shooting two streaming webcasts a week, essentially writing and producing the equivalent of two 30-minute programs a week with the assistance of a small but talented team of broadcast and streaming pros. (Download the WDRB+ app to watch streaming episodes of the show, called "Overtime." Rick Bozich approved this plug.)
Amid all that, I find that I'm writing less. But not Rick. He still files columns faithfully, every day. People introduce me as a sportswriter and I steal Tony Kornheiser's line: I used to be.
Rick Bozich still is. Always will be.
On the day Rick was introduced as a selection for the 2023 Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame class in Freedom Hall, I walked along the concourses looking at the plaques and was struck by how many of those people he had known or covered.
All of that, people have seen. They didn't see him faithfully checking on his great friend, Joe Biddle, a longtime columnist and radio host in Nashville, as he struggled with a long illness at the end of his life. They didn't see him faithfully pick up the phone to talk to an aging Howard Schnellenberger once or twice a week, about whatever was on the coach's mind that day.
I don't know how many times Rick and I have started to walk to a sports venue and he's said, "no chit-chat," only to stop a half-dozen times for him to talk to folks along the way. For Rick, it has always been about relationships, and it shows. Whether it was an interview, just the other day, when Oscar Brohm got emotional talking about his son's first game as U of L coach or former U of L star Manual Forrest opening up to him about his life, it was about people trusting him with their stories.
As journalism has changed, that never has. Not all Hall of Famers are Hall of Fame people. Rick Bozich is.
Tonight, when he finishes his acceptance speech, I suspect he'll have somebody, maybe his wife Rhonda, or son Alex or daughter Maggie, put a clock on it, and he'll have a guess as to how long it went.
Lots of things have changed in this business, and in the world. And Rick has had to change with them. But in some important ways, in many of the ways that have made him great, he has not.
I'm glad he's still on the clock. And I count it one of the great strokes of good fortune in my life that I've had the privilege to spend so many years on the clock with him.
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