Bill Millsaps

William H. Millsaps Jr. grew up in Daisy, Tennessee, attended the University of Tennessee, and spent three years at the Knoxville Journal before the Richmond Times-Dispatch hired him as a sports reporter in September 1966. He did not leave. The paper made him associate sports editor in 1972, executive sports editor in 1973 and sports editor in 1977, and his column became the Virginia sports page’s fixed point for the next decade and a half. The state’s sportswriters named him Virginia sportswriter of the year eleven times, and his work also appeared in Sports Illustrated and the U.S. Golf Association’s journal.

In January 1992 the Times-Dispatch moved him out of sports to managing editor, and in January 1994 to senior vice president and executive editor, the top newsroom job. Under his editorship the paper won the Virginia Press Association’s W. S. Copeland Award for public service in 1993 and 1996. Along the way he served as president of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association and of the Associated Press Sports Editors, the organization that would later hand him its lifetime honor.

Sports reporter in 1966, executive editor in 1994, at the same paper.

The A.P.S.E. gave Millsaps the Red Smith Award in 2011. The Virginia Sports Hall of Fame inducted him on August 25, 2017. He died in April 2020 at seventy-seven; the Times-Dispatch obituary, by John O’Connor, called him a celebrated sportswriter and a popular executive, which from a newsroom is a rarer pairing than it sounds.

Beyond that the record available to this archive is short. Millsaps has no Wikipedia article, and his columns from the 1970s and 1980s survive mostly in the paper’s own files and in citations elsewhere. We have not tried to fill the gaps with guesswork. What is documented is a forty-year career at one newspaper, a column good enough to be honored eleven times in its own state, and an editorship that produced two public-service awards.