Reader TTS

SOME PEOPLE SEEK OUT NEW PLACES AND NEW EXPERIENCES IN RETIREMENT, BUT YOU AND CHERYL MOVED TO A SMALL TOWN NEAR WHERE YOU GREW UP. WHAT LED YOU TO DO THAT? As a journalist, I had a charmed

life. I got to do everything I ever wanted as a newspaperman. I literally had been around the world, so I had nowhere to go but home. It was natural. My wife and I had both grown up in

Atlanta, Illinois, near where we settled down. It was like a 50-year road trip, so let’s close the circle and go home. HOW DIFFERENTLY DID YOUR RETIREMENT TURN OUT COMPARED TO WHAT YOU HAD

ENVISIONED? What turned out was that I was a writer, and writers write. I actually had no plans to quit writing, but I didn’t know what I would write when we came home. But then, through a

family and friend connection, I went to a girls high school basketball game. And I discovered that I couldn’t sit there and not take notes. I had to write something about it. So I began to

do that. I’ve done it now for 13 seasons.   YOU STARTED OUT AT A SMALL PAPER DECADES AGO, WRITING ABOUT LOCAL TEAMS. IS THERE SOMETHING BENEFICIAL ABOUT RETURNING TO YOUR ROOTS IN

RETIREMENT? I think there’s great value in it. You don’t really come to appreciate what created you until you go back and see it again and remember, OK, so here’s what I learned at the time

and what led me to believe this or decide that. I think it’s good to revisit the causes and events that shaped your life and learn from them again, because we’re always needing to learn

something else. WHAT KEEPS YOU AT THE KEYBOARD AFTER ALL THESE YEARS? Writing feels like such a part of me that every day, it’s almost like breathing. There’s a sense of purpose to it.

You’re trying to tell people about something they might enjoy, trying to entertain and inform. I wasn’t ready to quit being that guy, so I found a subject that intrigued me. I’ve probably

written 500,000 words about the Lady Potters. That’s more about those girls than I wrote about Muhammad Ali, and I covered him for 50 years. When I went to that game, I’d never seen high

school girls basketball. The Lady Potters had won that night, but I didn’t know if they were any good. It turned out that they were, but I didn’t write about them because they were state

champions. They were interesting to me. Every game, I see something I’ve never seen before, whether it’s a girl making nine 3-pointers in a game or a father carrying his injured daughter to

the locker room. I went to every game, and my wife went with me. We sat and watched. We’d ride home in the car and talk about it, and I’d write a story and put it up on the website. I didn’t

know if anybody would ever read it, but I didn’t care. It was writing.