March 4 marked 30 years since the day I was hired at the Record-Courier.
The milestone has me thinking about a lot of things about my 23 years at the paper – friends I made in the office, friends I made on the beat, the athletes I covered, the sporting events I witnessed, the comedy of errors that befell me on occasion (OK, too many occasions), and one person in particular who was largely responsible for my career in sports journalism:
Lynn Arnold.
I never met Lynn Arnold. But I read his high school sports articles in the Record-Courier religiously when he worked there in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was in elementary and junior high school at Mogadore at the time, and I may have just started high school when he left the R-C (I’m still digging around the internet to determine exact time frames). But I know one thing for certain: Every day the Record-Courier landed on our doorstep, I frantically opened it to see if there was anything in it by Lynn Arnold. I don’t care what the story was about – football, basketball, baseball or tiddlywinks, if his byline was on it, I was reading it. He could make a story about paint drying sound interesting.
That’s because Lynn Arnold wasn’t a good writer, he was a great writer. He’s still as good a sportswriter as I’ve ever read, and he was probably only somewhere in his 20s when he wrote for the Record-Courier. He was the Keith Jackson of Portage County high school sports: You knew your game was a big deal if Lynn Arnold was there.
To me, Mitch Albom is the Michael Jordan of sportswriting. The guy isn’t human. But Lynn Arnold is right there – and he was right here in Portage County leaving a lasting impression on a young kid trying to figure out what he wanted to do when he grew up. When it started to dawn on me that maybe the NFL wasn’t going to be an option, I began to think that writing about football for a living was the next best thing to playing it.
And that’s where Lynn came in. I didn’t just read his stories in the R-C, I studied them. In many ways, Lynn Arnold was my first journalism professor and class was in session every time I opened the newspaper. I pored over every aspect of his writing and marveled at how easy he made it look, how every word, every phrase, every sentence, every paragraph seemed to flow perfectly from the beginning of a story to the end. And he didn’t talk down to readers; instead, he had a “just plain folks” style of writing that was simple yet eloquent, almost like you went up to Lynn and asked, “Hey, how was the game?” and he told you about it – in a way that made you sorry you’d missed it.
But while his writing was conversational, it was also subtly complex, informative with his knowledge and insight yet entertaining with his ability to bring the printed page to life. Lynn didn’t just tell you what happened, he made you feel like you were actually at the game, the action unfolding in your mind’s eye to the point you’d swear you could smell the popcorn wafting from the concession stand.
Which is where I saw Lynn for the first and only time in the winter of 1981. It was halftime of the Mogadore at Windham boys basketball game, and I had just made my way out of the gymnasium and into the hallway to get a snack and drink. And standing there, just outside the doorway into the gym, was Lynn Arnold – who, quite frankly, didn’t look much older than me, and I was 12 years old.
I was starstruck. I had only known him as little more than printed words and a black-and-white mugshot photo in the newspaper, and now there he was, standing just a few feet away holding court with fans in the hallway. I wanted to go up to him, introduce myself and tell him how much I enjoyed reading his stories, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Sadly, I had built him up into this larger-than-life figure to the point that when my chance to finally meet him presented itself that winter’s night at Windham High School, I choked.
Try as I might, I couldn’t build up enough nerve to walk over to him. I wanted to say, “Hi Mr. Arnold, my name is Tom Hardesty and I’m in seventh grade at Mogadore. I really like your articles, and I want to write about sports someday.” Instead, I watched as he spoke with some people for a couple minutes before walking back into the gym for the second half.
I had missed my chance – forever, as it turned out, because Lynn has since passed away. But I’ll be forever indebted to him for helping to inspire my own career in journalism.
One thought struck me as I stood in the hallway that night at Windham: Lynn Arnold has the best job in the world. He’s actually getting paid to watch a high school basketball game. All he has to do is write a story about it. I could tell he was thoroughly enjoying himself, laughing and joking with people in the hallway and generally having a great time. No boss breathing down his neck. No hard labor. No dangerous machinery. Just getting paid to write sports in Portage County. I pretty much knew right then what my future held.
So when I walked into the old Record-Courier building in Ravenna on March 4, 1994 for my first day on the job at age 25, I couldn’t help but think of the countless times Lynn had walked through those same doors to write so many of the stories that I had grown up reading, hanging on every word and sometimes laughing out loud as I read another of his entertaining columns. Everything seemed to come full circle for me that day.
Thirty years have now passed, and I’m still getting paid to write sports in Portage County.
Thanks, Lynn.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.