Last Word
By Jimmy Roberts
When I was a kid, I thought being a journalist was about as good as it could possibly get. You didn’t have to do any math, you didn’t have to punch a clock, and you didn’t have to sit at a desk – unless, of course, you were Walter Cronkite.
In sports, it meant people like Jim McKay, Jack Whitaker, Dan Jenkins, and Dave Anderson.
Who didn’t think that these were people to be respected?
I wasn’t going to be a doctor, but I think my mother woulda signed for me to be any one of them.
So, I dove in, and at a few different places over the years, I’ve had a pretty good run. Then I woke up one day and realized I was “the media.”
Understand this is not about politics. These days no matter where you go, there seems to be a general disdain for people who do what I do. And there’s every bit as much rancor for people with microphones and pens in sports as there is inside the Beltway.
Nobody roots for the media.
I’m not sure I understand what happened. I didn’t see it coming, but it’s a little perplexing.
In every profession, there are scoundrels and saints.
I’ve thought about this the last couple of weeks because a couple of weeks ago I was given an award in the name of a journalist, Tim Rosaforte, who died in 2022. He had Alzheimer’s. He was 66 years old.
Tim understood the slings and arrows of the profession. Believe it or not, covering golf can be a full contact sport. “Rosie,” a former linebacker at Brewster High School and the University of Rhode Island, learned that firsthand, and he had the bruises to prove it.
He once told me about the time a hall of fame golfer’s wife looked him up and down because she didn’t like what he’d written about her husband.
But in point of fact, Rosie was a gentle giant who strived only to get it right.
I admired him for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of two things. He worked hard … comically hard, and he was relentlessly kind.
When I first started to really cover golf in the early 1990s, it was a pretty intimidating bunch of people I found myself shoulder to shoulder with in post round interviews. They were mostly fine – unlike the baseball writers, who seemed to make a sport out of excluding anyone they didn’t know. Rosie, though, stood out.
He was well-respected among his peers – think a member of the football team at the lunch table – but at the same time was more than happy to help out a member of the chess club. We became good friends through the years. At the start I often bounced things off him when I wasn’t certain I’d gotten it right, or the times I maybe needed a phone number. Later, when he started doing television, I was able to return the favor and lend him a hand with certain aspects of what seemed to him to be a foreign tongue.
As golf’s pace car heads to the pits, we’re coming down the grandstand straight away and accelerating into the new season. He’s been gone a few years now, but because of this award and the way so many of us seem to treat each other these days, Tim will be missed in an outsized way this year.
He was kind. Man, it just feels like we could all use more of that right now.
He was a journalist to admire.
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