Celebrating Tom Archdeacon: Longtime columnist enters Dayton Region Walk of Fame

“I’m dyeing it,” Grant joked. “Dyeing it grey.”

“Yeah, right,” Archdeacon said with a laugh.

Archdeacon, or Arch as he’s often called, can banter with Grant like that because they’ve known each other for more than 40 years. Grant was 15 when he first met Archdeacon in Miami, Fla., in the early 1980s. Archdeacon, a native of Ottoville, Ohio, worked then for the Miami News. Grant was a couple years away from making the decision to attend the University of Dayton, Archdeacon’s alma mater.

The paths of a sports writer and a future coach crossed again when Archdeacon wrote about Grant’s college career and when Grant interned with Archdeacon’s paper in Miami. They collided once more in 2017 when Grant accepted the head coaching job at Dayton in the city Archdeacon has called home since 1989. More than six years later, few are better equipped to talk about what makes Archdeacon special as he prepares to accept one of the great honors of his life.

Archdeacon will be inducted into the Dayton Region Walk of Fame along with Grammy Award-winning comedian/actor Dave Chappelle, early Ohio pioneer Charity Broady and retired Five Rivers MetroParks CEO Marvin Olinsky during a ceremony Wednesday at Sinclair Community College.

“In the sports culture, you create narratives,” Grant said, “and you have to kind of make predictions about the potential of what could happen, and sometimes it can collide with or magnify what the actual productivity or results are. To me what Tom’s done over the decades that I’ve known him is provided a much-needed and much-appreciated balance to that by giving the reader a window into the humanity of a subject.

“Aside from what they do in their chosen profession, that window shows you maybe the struggles, the heartaches, the successes, the failures that come with competition. Through the picture that he’s able to paint with his words, he inspires, he humbles, he provides a level of hope in terms of the way you feel after you walk away from one of his pieces.”

This is only the latest honor for Archdeacon, who joined the United States Basketball Writers Hall of Fame in 2017 and the Florida Boxing Hall of Fame in 2018. It’s a unique honor because of what Dayton means to him.

“It means a lot to me,” Archdeacon said. “Dayton has become real special to me. I love the town, and I can’t say enough, not only about everybody that reads (the paper) but all the people that just let me in their door and into their life. Sometimes it’s hard to tell our stories. That’s the thing I just really appreciate, that people trust me enough to do it.”

Home sweet home

Archdeacon has told thousands of stories over the years in the Dayton Daily News, starting on Jan. 18, 1989. His first headline read, “Palpable emotion fills the air” and had a Miami, Fla., dateline.

“You could smell the burned rubber, feel the simmering emotion,” Archdeacon wrote. “It gave an unsettling edge to the afternoon air in Overtown. ... And then came the pistol shots.”

Violence rocked Miami that week after the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black motorcyclist by a white policeman. Archdeacon was in town to write about Super Bowl XXIII between the Cincinnati Bengals and San Francisco 49ers. His first stories focused on the city of Miami, where he worked until the Miami News folded on Dec. 31, 1988.

Cox Newspapers owned the Miami News and offered jobs to employees at other newspapers in the company. Many opted for positions in Atlanta or nearby in West Palm Beach, Fla. Archdeacon headed to his college home in Dayton, knowing he would get a bonus if he stayed six months. He figured he would head back to Florida after that point.

“I got here, and it’s been home ever since,” Archdeacon said. “I thought I wouldn’t find enough news, but I found more and better stories than I ever could have imagined.”

Brad Tillson was the publisher of the Dayton Daily News when Archdeacon was hired. He remembers Archdeacon feeling a pull to Dayton because of his ties to the city.

“But he was a big-market guy,” Tillson said, “and we were not a big market. I believe there probably was a little bit of angst about exactly what his job would be because he was coming into an established sports department. ... Tom was not going to be the only ego in the sports department. That was a little bit delicate.

“But everybody understood that Tom was a unique talent, and for us to have the opportunity to get him on our pages, that was just a unique opportunity. I think we did everything that we could do to make it happen, and ultimately, it did happen, and I hope Tom would agree that it worked out pretty well.”

Archdeacon had plenty of chances to leave over the years. The short-lived national sports newspaper, The National, wanted him. Papers in Denver, San Diego and St. Louis, among others, pursued him.

Even in a smaller market than Miami, Archdeacon had the opportunity to cover big stories outside Dayton. He wrote about the Dream Team at the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, in 1992 and about Michael Johnson’s world-record time in the 200-meter dash four years later at the Atlanta Olympics. He was a regular at the Olympics for years.

A Dayton Daily News ad in 1994 featured a photo of Archdeacon conducting an interview and promoted him in a caption that read, “Sure, Tom Archdeacon has covered about every kind of sporting event — from Olympics and Kentucky derbies, to prize fights and high school rivalries. He’s traveled to Norway, Spain, the Soviet Union and Cuba, to name a few. But Tom also travels into people’s hearts, telling tales few can discover. When you read one of Tom Archdeacons stories, you see the world through his eyes. You feel the snowflakes in Lillehammer, the pounding on the mat of a prize fight, a young athlete’s butterflies or the loss and courage of the survivors of Hurricane Andrew. Tom’s coverage is unique in any arena.”

Archdeacon added to the legacy of a paper well known for producing Hall of Fame baseball beat writers. Si Burick, Ritter Collett and Hal McCoy all won the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given by the Baseball Writers Association of America.

“Arch was a totally different animal,” Tillson said, “and what he created was a whole new genre of sports writing in our department. My belief — and I suspect there’s some empirical evidence to back this up — is that he brought new readers to our sports pages.”

A real gift

Archdeacon grew up in Ottoville, 88 miles north of Dayton. His grandfather, L.W. Heckman, was a longtime coach, teacher and principal at Ottoville High School. He retired from coaching in 1951 with a record of 448-124 and was inducted into the Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1990. The gym at the school bears his name.

Archdeacon’s dad, also named Tom, was a good high school basketball player at Hamilton Catholic and played at Miami University until an injury sidelined him. He got into coaching, and Tom’s mom, Agnes, an English teacher, kept score for her husband’s team. His dad later become an official. He worked first as an industrial arts teacher and then ran the Ottoville Lumber Company.

Archdeacon grew up around sports and played baseball and basketball at Ottoville. He loved to read and write as well but did not aspire to be a journalist at any point. His newspaper career came about almost by accident.

Archdeacon traveled to Florida after graduating from UD in 1972 to be with his girlfriend whom he planned to marry. The relationship fell apart. Archdeacon was still living with the woman and her parents when the woman’s mom saw a help-wanted ad for a newspaper seeking a sports writer and suggested Archdeacon look into it.

“The job interview was taking me next door to the bar,” Archdeacon said, “and that’s one thing I could is sit at a bar and drink. They didn’t ask me if I could type.”

That’s how Archdeacon got his start with the South Dade News Leader in Homestead, Fla., just south of Miami, in 1973. He worked there until 1975 when he was fired for writing too many stories about Black athletes, an experience he wrote about when he introduced himself to Dayton Daily News readers in a February 1989 column.

In the same column, Archdeacon wrote about his failures to get a job in Ohio after being fired in Florida. He interviewed at newspapers all over the Dayton area. No one wanted him. Instead, he ended up back in Florida at the Miami News, where he worked for 13 years, making a name for himself chronicling Don Shula and the Miami Dolphins and the local boxing scene.

The move to Ohio gave Archdeacon an opportunity to reconnect with the University of Dayton. He has closed down UD Arena hundreds of times over the decades covering the Flyers, often with Doug Hauschild, UD’s sports information director since the early 1980s, nearby.

The workers cleaning out the arena after games could paint a picture of Archdeacon and Hauschild hard at work in a quiet arena in the wee hours of the morning. Hauschild has prepared numerous athletes — everyone from Chip Hare to Brian Roberts to DaRon Holmes II — for an Archdeacon interview.

“I usually tell them first off that he’s a Dayton grad,” Hauschild said, “just so they know that it’s somebody who knows the university, but I also tell them he’s a guy who has the room to write about a lot more than just the score and the stats.”

That’s something Archdeacon’s good friend Todd Jones, a former sports writer at the Cincinnati Post and Columbus Dispatch, knows well. Jones now hosts a podcast, “Press Box Access,” on which he interviews sports writers, many of whom are now retired. Archdeacon was his second guest in 2021.

“He is such a part of the community because he’s told the stories of the people in the community,” Jones said. “Arch taught me long ago that people want to read about people. They don’t want to read about things. That’s an old Jim Murray line that I always remembered. Arch brought it to life for me.

“I always kind of took that approach when I was in newspapers for 30 years. I would try to figure out, ‘How would Arch do this? How would Arch write about the humanity here?’ He’s got a real gift for that. His personality, his intelligence, his wit ... people like Arch, and they like to talk to him.”

Still going strong

Archdeacon has demonstrated his versatility many times over the years. He traveled to New York City after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, with a Dayton Daily News team that included reporter Laura Bischoff and photographer Ron Alvey. They filed reports from Ground Zero. Archdeacon wrote about the six University of Dayton graduates killed in the World Trade Center attacks.

In 2019, Archdeacon contributed to the paper’s coverage of the tornadoes that hit Dayton and the Oregon District shootings.

Archdeacon has also dedicated his career to telling stories that represent diverse viewpoints. He regularly writes columns about athletes and coaches at the area’s two Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Central State and Wilberforce. That’s a passion he first started developing during his student days at UD when he worked the “Afro-American” beat for the Flyer News.

“He’s always had a passion not for the racial component necessarily — although that plays into it — but the underdog,” said Michael Carter, the Chief Diversity Officer at Sinclair Community College. “He likes telling the story of the underrepresented person who has a story that is powerful, that no one else has really noticed.”

What has set Archdeacon apart from so many sports writers is his longevity. He turns 73 today — and is still going strong. He doesn’t plan to stop writing anytime soon.

“I don’t really have any real good hobbies or anything like that,” Archdeacon said. “I guess I’m going to do it as long as it’s still fun. It keeps me connected to the community. The other thing is my mom ended up with Alzheimer’s, and this is a way to try to force myself to keep sharp.”