maly, too: A Summit Meeting At The Well

Thursday, March 6, 2014

A Summit Meeting At The Well

By RON MALY

It was good to see old friends Jim Ecker, Pat Harty and Carl Gonder at or near press row yesterday during the girls' state high school basketball tournament at Wells Fargo Arena.

Gonder, the area director at Eastern Iowa Fellowship of Christian Athletes in Cedar Rapids, spotted me when I first came through the media entrance and began walking to my seat in the front row of the press area.

Gonder is a former standout collegiate basketball player at Augustana [S.D.], and he's the son of Ron Gonder, the semi-retired announcer at WMT-radio and KGAN-TV in Cedar Rapids.

I haven't seen Ron Gonder since we had lunch with Bob Brooks and Phil Haddy last fall at the University Athletic Club in Iowa City.

I asked Carl how his dad was doing, and he said, "Very well. He and my mother are on one of their traveling ventures right now. I'm not exactly sure where they are."

Well, I hope they're someplace warm.

Like the rest of you, I've certainly had enough winter.

The weather has been lousy here ever since we returned from a cruise to Hawaii in December.

I saw Ecker sitting at press row during the Valley-Southeast Polk game.

He was in town to cover the City High of Iowa City-Kennedy of Cedar Rapids game [City High won easily] for his MetroSportsReport.com website.

We talked for several minutes. Mostly about newspapers, of course.

Ecker was canned by the Cedar Rapids Gazette several years ago despite being one of the best reporters in the state.

As the late George Wine used to say, "Ecker covered every sports story with a fiery attitude, like he was working on the police beat."

Indeed, Ecker was, and still is, a bulldog of a reporter.

I told him I haven't seen his byline in the paper here for a quite some time.

For a while, he covered various events in eastern Iowa, such as Northern Iowa football and basketball games, for the Register on a freelance basis.

However, that has stopped, and the Register now uses stories from th Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier, if it uses anything at all.

I blame it on the paper's bean-counters.

They refuse to pay, or even use, freelancers for anything anymore.

Ecker did say, though, that he's had to turn down some freelance offers because his website is keeping him busier than ever.

"We're now covering Coe College and Kirkwood Community College in addition to all of our metropolitan high schools," Ecker said.

The next time I see him, I'll mention that he should expand his coverage and start covering Drake and Grand View here.

Both schools get continually short-changed by the Register.

I glanced at Ecker's site and saw that there's plenty of advertising on it. I'm glad he's doing well.

He deserves a break after what happened to him in the dying newspaper business.

Another guy who is getting a bigtime screwing from his paper is Pat Harty, a no-holds-barred guy who has a history of writing some of the best commentary in the state about men's and women's athletics at the University of Iowa for the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

But because of the cheapness of the Gannett Co., Harty has been relegated to writing a lot about high school sports now.

Harty saw me watching Valley's 68-60 loss to Southeast Polk, and stopped by to talk.

Several months ago, the Press-Citizen fired its sports editor, its chief high school reporter retired, and I think there have been other personnel cutbacks there, too.

Harty used to cover all or most of Iowa's football and basketball road games, but Gannett pulled the plug on that.

The Press-Citizen now uses stories written by Register writers. Both papers are owned by Gannett.

The Press-Citizen is the only paper in a Big Ten city that doesn't send reporters to road games.

That's horrible.

Harty told me the problems at the Gannett papers aren't tied so much to not being willing to spend money to cover events anymore, but that people are needed to put out the paper because there have been so many firings, layoffs and retirements, and no one has been replaced.

That still doesn't explain why the Register didn't send a reporter to Iowa's basketball game last week at Indiana.

That was inexcusable.

It had to be tied to the refusal of the company to pay for the trip a week after the original Iowa at Indiana game was postponed.

JOLTIN' JOE GOT IT STARTED

When Ron Maly was a kid in Cedar Rapids, he wanted to enter an essay contest, and he did. He wrote about Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees being his favorite baseball player. For finishing second in the contest, Ron won a Louisville Slugger baseball bat autographed by DiMaggio. Ron later wanted to be the first person in his family to attend college, and he was. He earned a degree in political science from the University of Iowa, and did what all political science majors do. He became a sportswriter. He had, after all, covered high school football, basketball and baseball games for the Cedar Rapids Gazette while he worked parttime during his university days. Ron wanted to sit in the press box and write about an Iowa-Minnesota football game, and he did. It happened while he was the sports editor at the Albert Lea [Minn.] Tribune, and the game was at Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis. Ron wanted to cover a World Series, and he did. Also when he was working for the Albert Lea newspaper. Ron wanted to cover Rose Bowls, Sugar Bowls, Orange Bowls, Cotton Bowls, Holiday Bowls, a Freedom Bowl, a Sun Bowl, a Super Bowl and NCAA basketball tournaments, and he did those things after he moved to Des Moines. Ron was a four-time sportswriter of the Year in the state of Iowa [the years were 1977, 1978, 1994 and 1996]. In 2006, he was named a charter member of the University of Iowa's media Wall of Fame in the Kinnick Stadium press box. A photo of the plaque that's displayed in the press box is displayed above this story. Following Ron's retirement from the newspaper business, a publisher asked him if he wanted to write a book about the rich football tradition at the University of Iowa, and he did. The hardback version of "Tales from the Iowa Sidelines" was a best-seller, and so was the revised, softback version. Now he's been asked by his publisher to update the book for a second time. He's in the process of doing that at the present time. Ron considers being asked to update a best-selling book for the second time to be the supreme compliment, considering the Hawkeyes won just four games in the 2012 season. When Ron isn't working on books, he's busy traveling and spending time with his family. Indeed, he attends the athletic, theatrical and musical [both vocal and instrumental] events in which his six grandchildren participate. He also writes about anything that interests him for his many websites. Every chance he gets, Ron proudly wears his America Needs Farmers T-shirt.

The Hawkeyes' Rich Football Tradition, Revisited

I mentioned a while back that I was in the process of updating my Tales from the Iowa Sidelines book. Updating it for the second time. The original hardback edition of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines [pictured at the right] was published in 2003, during the 10-3 season, when coach Kirk Ferentz and his Iowa football team had a 10-3 record that included a 37-17 victory over 15th-ranked Florida in the Outback Bowl and after the Hawkeyes went 11-2 in 2002. That book was a best-seller, so the publishers came to me again in 2005, a season that finished with a breathtaking 30-25 victory over No. 11 Louisiana State in the Capital One Bowl on New Year's Day, 2005. Because buyers had cleaned out the the shelves in the bookstores, the publishers wanted to know if I'd do an updated version of the book. I agreed, The revised, soft-cover edition [pictured at the left] was published in 2005. Warren Holloway, who teamed with quarterback Drew Tate on a miraculous 56-yard touchdown pass to win the Capital One Bowl, was featured on the cover. That book, too, turned into a best-seller, So I had reason to feel very good about my years as a published author. It's not every day that a the original version is a best-seller, and so is the updated version. Then, imagine my surprise when I received an e-mail from a senior editor at the publishing company last fall, wanting wanted to know if I was interested in doing a second updated version of the book. It came at a time when things weren't going well for the Hawkeyes in the 2012 season. They lost their last six games and finished with a 4-8 record. Frankly, the thought of doing a revised edition of the book during a 4-8 season seemed to be a stretch. "Maybe producing a revised edition in a year or two would be a better idea," I told the publishers. "We'd like to do it now," I was told. "Let me think about it," I said. After a few days of thought, I accepted the idea. I talked myself into the idea that this was the supreme compliment--being asked to do a second book update during a 4-8 season showed strong confidence by the publishers in me and in the Hawkeyes' football program. So I got back into the business of interviewing players and coaches again, going to postgame press conferences, weekly press conferences and a scrimmage in West Des Moines. After a press conference in Iowa City, I did a one-on-one interview with coach Kirk Ferentz, and mentioned to him that I was in the process of doing a revised edition of my two best-selling books. I congratulated him on the excellent things he had done for Iowa's football program--all of which contributed to the success of my books. "I think Coach Fry had more to do with it," he told me, bringing up the name of Hayden Fry, his one-time boss at Iowa and a man who brought Iowa's football program back from the dead in the 20th century. That's modest Kirk Ferentz for you. Even though the 2012 season wasn't something Hawkeye coaches, players and fans will recall with any special feeling, Ferentz has a 14-year record of 100-74 at Iowa that includes two 11-victory seasons [2002 smd 2009], two 10-victory seasons [2003 and 2004], plus he's been the Big Ten coach of year in 2002, 2004 and 2009, and national coach of the year in 2002. Indeed, Ferentz has done some wonderful things at Iowa City, and I fully expect his success to continue. I've concluded my writing for the second update of Tales from the Iowa Sidelines, and the senior editor has furnished me with an early look at the book. Not only are the Kirk Ferentz years included in the updated version, but so is the stuff I previously wrote about Howard Jones, Dr. Eddie Anderson, Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick and the 1939 Hawkeye Ironmen, Ronald Reagan, Ozzie Simmons, Ossie Solem, Randy Duncan, Alex Karras and lots of other legends from Iowa's rich football history. I expect the book to be in stores soon. I hope you like it.