Bob Ryan

Robert P. Ryan was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on February 21, 1946, took a history degree at Boston College in 1968 and joined the Boston Globe the next year. He was handed the Celtics beat almost immediately, at twenty-three, which is the sort of thing that happened at newspapers in 1969 and does not happen now. He covered the team from 1969 to 1982, left for two years, and came back to cover it again from 1984 to 1986.

The timing was good. His first stretch ran through the Dave Cowens and John Havlicek championships of 1974 and 1976; his second caught the Larry Bird teams at their peak. Ryan wrote about the NBA with a fan's appetite and a beat writer's access, and he made a case in print, night after night, that the league deserved a serious readership at a time when much of the sports press treated it as a novelty.

Boston in the early 1970s was a Bruins town with a Red Sox problem, and the Celtics, despite eleven titles in thirteen seasons under Red Auerbach, played to half-empty buildings. Ryan's beat coverage treated the team as a subject worth reading about on its own terms. When the Bird, McHale and Parish teams filled the Garden a decade later, the paper had a writer who had been paying attention all along, and the daily reports from that period are still the best contemporary record of those seasons.

The two-year gap between his Celtics stints was spent trying television full-time. He came back to the paper, which tells you something about where he thought the real work was, even if the cameras never quite let him go.

From 1989 Ryan was a general sports columnist for the Globe, which in Boston means the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Bruins, the marathon and whatever the college teams are doing, in addition to the Celtics. He covered Olympic Games and Final Fours and was, by the paper's own reckoning, its most recognisable byline for two decades.

He filed his last regular column on August 12, 2012, after forty-three years on staff. He did not stop writing; he has continued to contribute to the Globe and to publish books, and his television work carried on. Retirement, in his case, described the end of the daily deadline rather than the end of the job.

He got the Celtics beat at twenty-three and gave up the daily column at sixty-six. The forty-three years between account for the award.

Ryan was one of the newspaper columnists who found a second audience on ESPN. He appeared for years on The Sports Reporters, the Sunday panel Dick Schaap hosted, and became a regular on Around the Horn and a frequent stand-in host of Pardon the Interruption. Between 2007 and 2008 he hosted Globe 10.0 on NESN. The on-air persona, voluble and quick to a strong opinion, was the same one that ran in the paper.

The television work made him nationally known in a way a Boston column alone would not have, and it is a fair guess that a good share of the people who know his name have never read a paragraph he wrote. He is unbothered by this and has said as much.

What carried over from page to screen was the enthusiasm. Ryan's columns read like a man who still wanted to be at the game, and the television version was the same man talking faster. Tony Kornheiser, a Pardon the Interruption host and a Red Smith Award recipient himself, has called him the quintessential American sportswriter, which is a friend's judgement but not an isolated one.

The bibliography is largely basketball. Forty-Eight Minutes, written with Terry Pluto, reconstructed a single Celtics-Cavaliers game in 1987. Drive: The Story of My Life was Larry Bird's autobiography, written with Ryan. Scribe: My Life in Sports, published in 2014, is his own memoir, and it covers the ground you would expect: Trenton, Boston College, the Celtics locker room, the Olympics, the Sunday-morning arguments. It is also candid about the trade itself, about what a beat writer owes the team and what he owes the reader, and about how the newspaper business he entered in 1969 had turned into something else by the time he left it.

The 2015 Red Smith Award came three years after he left the daily column and in the same year as the PEN/ESPN lifetime award, a pairing that covers both halves of what he did: the newspaper work and the writing that outlived the next morning's edition.