I don’t know if an conversation like this had ever taken place. Maybe at some point, Ritter Collett, Si Burick, Gary Nuhn, etc. got together to talk hoops. It might have been a weekly occurrence back in the day when the paper had more than a dozen full-time sports writers. At the very least, nothing quite like this had been done in this century. Tom Archdeacon, who probably has covered more UD games than anyone in history, planned to join us but was sick that day.
My goal in putting three former UD beat writers for the DDN and the current beat writer (me) in the same room was to add to the collection of stories I’ve written about the history of UD basketball, which is so important to thousands of fans. I’m trying to hit all the angles in this twice-a-month Flyer Connection section.
• This year, I’ve written about the biggest upsets in school history and the 35th anniversary of the 1990 Flyers.
• Last year, I covered the 10th anniversary of the Elite Eight season, the 20th anniversary of the 2004 NCAA tournament team and the 40th anniversary of the 1984 Elite Eight team.
• Two years ago, I celebrated the 20th anniversary of the 2003 Atlantic 10 Conference tournament championship team.
There are more stories like that to come. I’ve got a 10-year anniversary piece on the memorable 2015 season running Feb. 23.
The idea of talking to former UD beat writers came about in part because I listen to several podcasts that feature journalists telling stories. “Press Box Access” with former Columbus Dispatch sports writer Todd Jones and “Two Writers Slinging Yang” with Jeff Pearlman have given me countless hours of entertainment on drives from my home in Bexley to UD Arena.
Albers, 86, McCoy, 84, and Harris, 67, have combined to work well over 100 years with the Dayton Daily News, the Journal Herald and Springfield News-Sun. I’ll hit my 24th anniversary with Cox newspapers (now Cox First Media) in May.
McCoy and Harris still contribute as freelance writers, but neither they or Albers had visited the new DDN office in the Manhattan Building on Third Street. It’s nothing like the newsroom they remember in the historic building on the corner of Fourth and Ludlow, but the long history of the newspaper continues. It’s built on the work of reporters like them and many more.
Here are some excerpts of our conversation:
Getting the job
• McCoy, who grew up in Akron and graduated from Kent State, worked at the Journal Herald from 1962-66 and then took a job at The Detroit Free Press.
“They had the racial riots in 1967,” McCoy said, “and I stood on the Detroit Free Press building watching the city burn. I could not get home for three days because the tanks were going through the streets, and we weren’t allowed on the streets.”
Soon after that, Dayton Daily News sports editor Si Burick called McCoy and asked, “Would you like to come back to Dayton?”
McCoy told him, “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“He gave me the University of Dayton beat,” McCoy said, “and that’s how it got started.”
McCoy gained greater fame as the Cincinnati Reds beat writer for the Dayton Daily News. That’s why he’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he started with the UD beat.
• Albers, a 1956 graduate of Fort Loramie High School, worked at papers in Sidney and Fairborn before being hired by Collett to cover high school sports at the Journal Herald in the days when Dayton, like many cities, was a two-newspaper town. He covered everything over the years, spending eight years on the Cincinnati Bengals beat and about five years on the Cincinnati Reds beat. The auto racing and golf beats were also a big part of his job.
Albers, a UD graduate, always wanted the Flyers beat, but it was never open. He finally got the chance when Gary Nuhn stepped away from the beat in February 1987 to focus on column writing. Nuhn was appointed a full-time columnist in August 1987 and held that job until retiring in 2000. Albers covered UD sports from then until retiring from a full-time job at the paper in 2006.
• Harris, an Alter graduate who played for the Flyers from 1975-79, took over the beat when Albers retired. He started covering the team before the 2006-07 season and continued on the beat until a month before the 2013-14 season began, at which point I got the job after one season on the Wright State beat.
I enjoyed covering Billy Donlon’s team the year before, and my initial reaction was disappointment, I wouldn’t get to follow the same group in the 2013-14 season. Of course, long term, I knew it was a great opportunity to cover one of the paper’s most important beats.
Covering the coaches
• McCoy first covered the UD beat in the 1967-68 season, the season after the Flyers lost to UCLA in the NCAA championship game. That was coach Don Donoher’s fourth season.
“He was hard to work with,” McCoy said. “He was tough for me. He hated to lose, of course. When he lost, we were allowed to go into locker rooms after games and interview the players and interview him, and you’d have to hunt him down. Then he’d give you one- and two-word answers. He was kind of a tough interview.”
• Albers covered the program’s worst years in the 1990s under Donoher’s successor, Jim O’Brien, who led the program to the NCAA tournament in 1990 as a first-year coach only to win a total of 10 games in his last two seasons (1992-94).
“O‘Brien came with a lot of enthusiasm,” Albers said. “He was from the east. He thought he was going to be able to do a good job. They caught fire and went to the tournament in his first year, and everybody was all excited. They thought, ‘This guy’s going to have another long tenure, like everybody else.’ Then it kind of went downhill from there.”
Asked if it was hard to cover those down years, Albers said, “I didn’t think it was hard. You’ve got your job to do. You just write what you see, and sometimes it isn’t very pleasant. Maybe nobody’s reading it, but you’re still writing it. I grew up as a fan, but once I was a writer, you stop being a fan. You become a writer, and you write what’s there.”
Albers got along well with the coach who followed O’Brien, Oliver Purnell, who led the program for nine years.
“They brought in Oliver, and he had to build it back,” Harris said, “and he did. They went back to NCAA tournament. He did a great job turning it around.”
• Harris dealt with two coaches in his years on the beat: Brian Gregory, who coached the Flyers for eight seasons (2003-11); and then Archie Miller.
Harris had a favorite story about Gregory and how he handled his star player, Brian Roberts, in his final season.
“One thing about Gregory I liked was how he didn’t coddle his star players,” Harris said. “Brian Roberts was a borderline draftee. I think he ended up being a free agent, but played in the league, and he would have scouts come to check him out at UD. One time in a game, he was playing bad, and Gregory took him out. He told me this later that he said to him, ‘You need to thank me for taking you out of the game. Every minute you were out there, you were losing money.’ So I just thought I love that. Here’s his best player, but he’s still coaching him hard.”
• Harris agreed with my take on Miller. He’s an intense coach who rarely cracked a smile. I’ve often said when asked about Miller that he didn’t love doing media interviews but was a great quote.
“He’d often come to the mid-week media availability drenched in sweat because he had just stepped off the treadmill after a workout,” I told the other writers. “You knew you weren’t his highest priority. and we shouldn’t have been his highest priority. Anthony (Grant) is different. He’s easy to deal with and always cordial and friendly. If you ask a bad question, he’s going to answer it without being rude, unlike so many coaches. But he also doesn’t want to give you a whole lot of insight. Sometimes he doesn’t want you to know why he called this play or made this lineup change — not all the time but sometimes. He doesn’t like to ever speak badly about players, so that makes it hard to find out exactly what’s going on with the team.”
Telling favorite stories
• One of McCoy’s favorite Donoher stories came in his first season on the beat. The writers traveled with the team in those days. On a trip to Western Kentucky, McCoy shared a room with Gene Schill, the longtime UD sports information director. After a loss to the Hilltoppers, McCoy remembered Donoher telling all the players to sit at the back of the bus, two players to a seat.
“I want your stink to rub off on each other,” Donoher said.
The Flyers soon turned that season around, ending the season with a 13-game winning streak and a NIT championship.
• Long before he covered the Dayton beat full time, Albers helped Jim Zofkie cover the Final Four in 1967 in Louisville for the Journal Herald. Dayton lost 79-64 to UCLA in the NCAA championship game. The Bruins’ star was Lew Alcindor, who later changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
“I was sitting on press row,” Albers said, “and when we lost the game — we being Dayton — I lost the game. Lew Alcindor’s family were sitting across the court from me — his mother and dad — and my plan was to go interview Alcindor’s parents. I was standing nearby so when the ceremonies ended I could just slide into the seats and talk to them.
“Well, something happened in the ceremony that was unbelievable. The student manager handed me the game ball. I’m standing there with the game ball, and when the game ended, all of us — us Bruins — headed for the locker room. I was their game-ball carrier. Oh my gosh. So I went right in, right past the cops, and I got the game ball and I sat down, and I heard a couple guys say, ‘Dayton is bad.’ They didn’t know they were talking to the media. Then Lew came in and had the net from the game and threw it down. He sat right next to me. It was an experience to be part of a championship team.”
Enjoying the access
One of the biggest differences between covering the team now and back in the day is that I don’t get to attend practices or travel with the teams to games. That kind of access is rare in journalism these days but was common when McCoy and Albers covered the team.
Albers said he attended some practices during the Donoher years, but said, “I don’t think he would have liked it if we were there every day.”
McCoy did go to every practice early in the Donoher era.
“At one practice,” McCoy said, “Donoher got so mad that he punted a basketball up into the 400 level. He looked at me and he said, ‘You’re not going to write about that, right?’”
The writers built relationships with the players because they were around them so much. McCoy recently had lunch with Don May and Ken May, two Dayton natives from his era who still live in the area.
Admiring the fans
The UD fan base has ranked among the nation’s best since the Tom Blackburn days in the 1950s and early 1960s, but the construction of UD Arena pushed the Flyer Faithful to a new level.
“I can remember covering games in the old UD Fieldhouse,” McCoy said, “and they filled that up with 5,280 or whatever it was. When they decided to build the arena and said they were going to have 13,000 seats, I said, ‘They’re crazy. They’re never going to fill it. No way.’”
McCoy was wrong on that prediction. Dayton has ranked in the top 35 every season since the arena opened in 1969. UD welcomed its 11 millionth fan to the arena in November. It has sold out four straight seasons.
“Our family still has our season tickets from when the arena opened,” Harris said. “I’ve been buying three games a year, and I went to one this year and took a buddy, and he said, ‘Is this what it was like when you were there?’ I was like, ‘No, it’s gone up several levels.’ I mean probably averaged 12,000 fans, but just the energy is different. I just think Dayton does a great job with the gameday presentation, and then what they’ve done with the arena, with the remodels over the years, it’s just beautiful.”
Making the deadlines
During our interview, I showed Albers, McCoy and Harris the phone app I use to record interviews. It’s called Otter. It transcribed the conversation as we talked. It’s not 100% accurate but is an amazing resource for journalists and has saved me hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in recent years. The bane of any reporter’s existence was transcribing interviews, until apps like Otter came along to do the job for us.
Otter is the technological achievement I dreamed about in my first 20-something years in journalism. The other piece of the job that was a challenge in the late 1990s when I got my start in the business was getting a piece back to the newspaper in time for deadline from a high school football field press box, a baseball stadium, etc.
I’m fortunate I came along after the age of the typewriter. Albers and McCoy know that era well. They would start writing their game stories at halftime because they didn’t have much time after the game to make deadline.
“I just can’t believe I used a typewriter and typed it on a typewriter and handed it to an operator,” McCoy said. “I can remember in St. Louis one time going to the Western Union office after the game at night because there wasn’t an operator at the game. Someone didn’t show up.”
“When you went to a major event,” Albers said, “they had all these writers coming up and throwing their stuff down and two or three operators. You tried to be nice to the operator to keep your story on top.”
McCoy knew a trick to make sure his story got preferential treatment from the operators transmitting the story back to Dayton.
“I’d put a $20 bill on top at the World Series,” McCoy said.
“I was too tight for that,” Albers said.
McCoy and Albers did spend a large chunk of their career in the computer era, though the first computers they took with them to games required more strength than the thin, lightweight laptops I carry around.
“I had this Teleram, which was this huge thing with a TV screen on it,” McCoy said. “It weighed about 50 pounds. Oh my gosh. Somebody could come out and kick out your plug and your story was gone.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Life these days
Albers and his wife Judy have a son who lives in California and a daughter in Columbus. They have four grandkids. Albers still goes to every UD home game and has a tradition of buying a candy bar at the concession stand before taking his seat.
Albers continued writing a local golf column for the Dayton Daily News until 2020, long after his retirement as a full-time writer. He started covering the sport in 1977 and was honored for his longtime dedication covering the sport when he was inducted into the Ohio Golf Hall of Fame in 2001.
Since stepping away from his full-time newspaper job in 2013, Harris has used the extra time to play golf as often as possible, mostly at Locust Hills Golf Club in Springfield, where he lives. He also has covered Wright State sports as a freelance writer for the Dayton Daily News for many years.
McCoy, who has three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, has lived in Englewood with his wife Nadine for many years. He still writes from home about almost every Cincinnati Reds game for the paper and for his own website: HalMcCoy.com. He posts his stories to Facebook as well.
“My wife says, ‘You work harder now than you did when you weren’t retired,’” McCoy said. “I write every day. People always ask me how long I’m going to do it, and I say, ‘When my head hits the laptop.’”
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