Honors for sports-writing lifer: Bob Spear’s nickname fits him well

There’s a saying among members of the U.S. Marines Corps – more of a credo, actually – that there is no such thing as a “former Marine” or an “ex-Marine.” Once in, you’re a Marine for life.

Bob Spear – who, by the way, was an active-duty Marine from 1968-70 – makes a strong case that the same credo applies to sports writers.

Eight years removed from “retiring” in 2008 as sports columnist at the end of 44 years with The State, the Florida native and lifelong Columbia resident still regularly churns out stories for the newspaper. A weekly golf notebook; features on South Carolina’s PGA Tour and college players; reports on the horse racing industry in Aiken and Camden.

Name it, and he’s done it.

If you didn’t know better, you might conclude that “retired” is merely another job title in Spear’s lengthy career list – intern, writer, reporter, copy editor, assistant sports editor, sports editor and columnist – from a career during which he did exactly what he always wanted to do with his life.

The 73-year-old chuckles wryly at that notion.

“I don’t follow it now like I used to,” he said, looking ahead to being honored as the sixth annual Herman Helms Media Excellence Award winner, during Monday night’s South Carolina Athletic Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. “If it’s something I’m interested in now, OK.”

Don’t be fooled, said Bill Mitchell, former high school and basketball reporter for The State, who followed his childhood friend and fellow Dreher High alum into the sports department.

“I’ve known him for maybe 60 years, and he always knew what he wanted to do – and did what he set out to do,” Mitchell said. “He loved sports and loved to write.”

Spear’s selection is particularly fitting, given his relationship with Helms, The State’s sports editor and columnist for nearly three decades. It was Helms, brought to Columbia from Charlotte in 1963 to whip a struggling sports department into shape, who hired Spear, a journalism student at South Carolina, in the summer of 1964 and made him a full-time employee soon after.

It also was Helms – a giant figure in S.C. sports journalism – who made Spear assistant sports editor in 1982, and lobbied for him to take Helms’ position in 1987. Among a core group of writers over 30-plus years – including Mitchell, Ernie Trubiano and Bob Cole – there was never any doubt which had been groomed for the top job.

“(Spear) did it all,” Cole said. “If you had to name his strong point, he was very detail-oriented. It came natural to Bob. I think Herman realized all along, and knew who would be the guy for the (editor’s) job.”

Mitchell said Spear was “incredibly efficient and organized without effort, level-headed, always thinking. Of all of us, he was the most logical to replace Herman. It’s appropriate that an award for journalism excellence is named after Herman Helms, and that his top student would win it.”

To win an award named for his mentor and role model is “pretty meaningful,” Spear said. “I still think about what he brought to The State: professionalism. He raised the level of that, throughout the newspaper.

“Plus he could write like crazy, really turn a phrase. And he wasn’t afraid to take on anyone,” from coaches to athletes to school administrators. “He wasn’t always right, but he always had opinions.”

Following in Helms’ footsteps was a daunting task. In those days, the tall, slender, patrician-like editor seemed larger than life during battles with USC football coaches Paul Dietzel and Jim Carlen and, to a lesser degree, basketball legend Frank McGuire. Spear’s style was more low-key, less confrontational, though he says he never backed down from a fight.

As for following Helms as an administrator, though … “I preferred writing,” Spear said. “There were too many headaches as editor, a lot to be responsible for.

“But every day, you had to get the job done. And we always did.”

From American Legion to World Series

Spear started his journalism career at Dreher with The Blueprint student newspaper, and after graduating in 1961 moved on to USC’s journalism school. When his parents relocated to Charlotte, he asked Helms to recommend him for a part-time job there; instead, Helms hired him full-time before Spear graduated in 1965.

He still recalls his first assignment: covering Post 6 American Legion baseball. “The game was rained out, so I talked to Cy Szakacsi, the coach,” Spear said. “Back then, the litmus test to write sports was (correctly) spelling Cy’s name.”

Spear, as did most rookie sports writers, started covering high schools and moved up to college sports. When the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, he added Major League Baseball to his areas of expertise. And always, he – and everyone in the department – pulled desk duties on days he wasn’t writing.

“At one time, I thought I wanted to be a baseball beat writer,” Spear said. “It looked good at the time, but later you find out it was a pain in the (rear).” Even so, Trubiano recalls Spear keeping full statistics on the Braves, at a time when clubs didn’t provide reams of material.

Perhaps fittingly for a writer in South Carolina, Spear’s first state press association award, for column writing, came on an interview with famed baseball owner Bill Veeck … who was making an appearance at Darlington Speedway. “It was really a feature, but the desk put a column head on it,” Spear said.

Even as a young journalist, Mitchell said, Spear demonstrated a maturity beyond his years. “He was a good writer – he wasn’t Hemingway – but he was a relentless administrator,” Mitchell said.

Added Trubiano (who later helped create the Helms award as a Hall of Fame board member), “You could throw anything at him and he’d do it. I almost had a heart attack when Herman wanted me to go to Darlington for the race, but Spear could do anything. He could go cover a tiddlywinks tournament.”

His style was more buttoned-down than others, but that didn’t mean Spear didn’t have fun. Mitchell laughs in telling about a No. 1-vs.-No. 2 basketball game in the 1970s between Duke and Michigan State that Spear, writer Add Penfield and friend Bill Simpson all wanted to see.

“They decided they were going to drive there – to Detroit,” Mitchell said. “Bob told me, ‘Don’t tell Herman,’ even though he was off work. Herman that night asked me if I’d seen Bob, did I know where he was, and I finally told him.

“I’d never seen Herman so shocked. He said, ‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Bob planned to write a story from the game, so Herman said, ‘Take the story … then tell him if he’s not back by 4 p.m. tomorrow to work the desk, he’s fired.’ ”

Mitchell knew there was no chance the three could drive back by then. Yet the next day around 3:55 p.m., “Bob saunters in like nothing’s happening,” Mitchell said, laughing. “He later tells me they stopped in Kentucky so he could catch a plane home.”

The State’s sports department then was filled with characters, and nicknames. Mitchell, a former high school coach, was “Coach.” Trubiano was “E” or, because of his heritage, a mildly derogatory name for Italians. Cole was “Gnat,” a sort-of reference to Nat King Cole. Helms was called “The Old Timer,” or “O.T.” – though never to his face.

Spear’s nickname, then and now: The “Old Pro,” a reference to his love of baseball and a story involving Pee Wee Reese, Mitchell said.

“Old Pro,” then and now, fit him well.

A love of golf

When Knight-Ridder bought The State in 1987, Spear saw his career shift. Helms retired to write columns from home and Spear became sports editor. That took him out of press boxes and put him in the office, overseeing production of the daily newspaper most nights.

“Bob was the guy who came early and stayed late,” Mitchell said. “He took over a veteran staff, and he always took care of his people. It’s not easy to be out in the field with all of us, being one of us, and then be in charge, but he was the guy to lead the staff after Herman stepped down.”

Spear held the sports editor title until retirement, but returned to writing columns in the mid-1990s when new administrators moved into the department. “A relief, I think,” Mitchell said. Also during that time, Spear discovered a later-in-life passion that still grips him: golf.

“When I was growing up, that was a country club sport, and (he and his family) weren’t country club,” he said. He took up playing as sports editor, he said, “to get away from the telephones.”

Soon, though, Spear’s passion for sports history and lore led him to embrace golf, notably the Masters – which he first covered in 1991; “(Ian) Woosnam won,” he said – and the RBC Heritage in 1999. Still, it was the 1999 U.S. Open in Pinehurst that turned golf into a love affair.

“At the Open, (reporters) could get inside the ropes,” unlike at the Masters, Spear said. “You could feel like you were a part of things.” Watching showdowns between Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson (like Spear, a lefty) and winner Payne Stewart “hooked me on golf,” he said. “You could see more than you ever see from a press box.

“I’d read so much about it, and then to go there, seeing shots where (Sam) Snead and (Ben) Hogan hit shots. Of course,” he said, “I knew a lot of it already.” Indeed, some sports writers can cite myriad facts from sports history, but Spear’s memory of details, then and now, remain near-encyclopedic.

Of the coaches and athletes he met and covered, Spear names a few favorites: Jack Nicklaus (golf) and John Smoltz (Braves baseball) for their patience and candor with reporters; former USC quarterback Jeff Grantz for his approachability and willingness to explain football strategy. Among coaches, he has two: the late Bill Wilhelm, longtime Clemson baseball coach, and Dave Odom, USC’s basketball coach from 2001-08 – Spear’s final years at The State.

Odom, a longtime institution at Wake Forest, and Spear discovered a mutual love of basketball history and conversation. “A kindred spirit … I think so,” Odom, who now shuttles between Winston-Salem and his beach house, said. “After the ‘official’ part of an interview, he’d ask me ACC questions and I’d ask him about when South Carolina was in the ACC and McGuire was here, because he’d been around through all of that.”

Coaches, Odom said, are taught early “to be wary of journalists. Bob and I had a conversation once about how it’s hard for sports media to be good friends with those they cover on a regular basis. But I disputed that, and he did, too. And we proved that theory wrong, because we came to be good friends.”

Spear, Odom said, made that easy. “When you do an interview, all you can ask is to be portrayed properly, and he always did that,” the coach said. For that reason, he was happy to hear about the Helms Award honor.

“I’m delighted that the hall of fame has recognized Bob’s contributions through the years,” he said. “What a great way to do that … and it’s highly deserved. I like to see good things happen to good people, and there’s not a finer person than him.”

Spear likely would laugh at that. Besides ducking praise, he wasn’t always so popular with USC coaches – notably Joe Morrison, whom he hammered over the Gamecocks’ late-1980s steroid scandal.

Perhaps Spear’s quintessential coach moment came in 1996. He was in Phoenix for the Super Bowl when legendary Clemson football coach Frank Howard died. Who on The State staff could write the final words on Howard? Who had the history, the knowledge, the wealth of anecdotes, the appreciation for another era?

Spear, of course. His column later won a press association award. Oh, and about the Super Bowl? Yes, he still covered that, too.

Just what you’d expect a sports-writing lifer to do.

This story was originally published May 14, 2016 at 10:57 PM with the headline "Honors for sports-writing lifer: Bob Spear’s nickname fits him well."