Tom McEwen

Tom McEwen received the Red Smith Award in 1993, the year after he stepped down as sports editor of The Tampa Tribune. By then he had run the Tribune's sports department for thirty years, written what the paper estimated at more than 10,000 columns and articles, and been named Florida Sportswriter of the Year nineteen times. The award honored an editor as much as a writer, which fits. He took over a department of seven people in 1962 and left one of fifty-seven, and the Tampa Bay sports map he covered was partly his own drawing.

Red Smith winners are usually columnists first. McEwen was a columnist every day of the week, but the reason his name is on press boxes and a street sign is what he did with the desk, not just the column.

Thomas Massey McEwen was born in Tampa on March 16, 1923, and grew up in Wauchula, a small town in Hardee County. His older brother, James Milton 'Red' McEwen, played football for the Florida Gators and later became state attorney in Tampa. Tom followed him to the University of Florida, studied journalism and edited the student paper, The Alligator.

The Army called him out of Gainesville in 1944. He trained at Fort Hood, entered as a private and left as a captain, serving in the Pacific with the 785th Tank Battalion. After the fighting he was a prison officer at POW Camp No. 1 in the Philippines, responsible for some 2,000 prisoners. He stayed with the Florida National Guard for decades afterward, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1976, and received the Florida Order of Merit. None of this appeared in the sports pages, but it explains the man readers met there: a Wauchula boy who had commanded troops before he had commanded a copy desk.

He wrote sports for the Fort Myers News-Press and the St. Petersburg Times through the 1940s and 1950s, moved to the Tampa Times in June 1958, and in April 1962 became sports editor of The Tampa Tribune. He held that job until 1992, kept writing columns for the paper until 2001, and then wrote online until his death in 2011. That is a working life of more than sixty years on Florida sports pages, most of it in one city.

His main column, 'The Morning After,' ran six days a week. A second one, 'Hey Tom!', appeared weekly, usually on Sundays, as a question-and-answer with readers. Between the two he was in the paper every day, which is how a sports editor turns from a byline into a civic figure. He also taught seminars for the American Press Institute and at Columbia University, and served as president of the Football Writers Association of America in 1973-74.

Tampa had no major professional team when McEwen took over the Tribune sports desk. By the time he died it had three, and in each case he is credited with pushing. The one he is best remembered for is the NFL. He campaigned for years for a franchise, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers began play in 1976. He later advocated for the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL and for the baseball club that became the Rays, and he backed the athletic programs at the University of Florida and the University of South Florida.

A sports editor lobbying for teams is not a neutral position, and McEwen did not pretend it was. He saw the paper as a booster of the city's sports ambitions and used the column accordingly. Readers in other markets might have called that boosterism; readers in Tampa called it Tom. The Pro Football Writers of America gave him the Dick McCann Memorial Award in 2000 for long and distinguished reporting on the pro game, which amounts to the league's acknowledgement of the debt.

Seven employees in 1962. Fifty-seven by the time he handed over the desk.

The honors kept coming after the award. The University of Florida named him a distinguished graduate, and Saint Leo University gave him a Doctor of Letters in 2011, the year he died. The press boxes at Tampa Stadium and later at Amalie Arena carried his name; a street at Raymond James Stadium still does. An athletic scholarship at Florida is endowed in his name, and the Tom McEwen Family Foundation, established in 2012, funds sports journalism scholarships.

• Florida Sportswriter of the Year: 19 times (1962-1993, and again in 2000)
• President, Football Writers Association of America, 1973-74
• Red Smith Award, Associated Press Sports Editors, 1993
• Dick McCann Memorial Award, Pro Football Writers of America, 2000
• Doctor of Letters, Saint Leo University, 2011

Tom McEwen died on June 5, 2011, at eighty-eight. The Buccaneers, the Lightning and the Rays were all still in town.