It’s all come full circle for Adrian Wojnarowski after our St. Bonaventure dreams became reality
The knock on the door came at an obscenely early hour — for a college junior, anyway. It was probably the crack of noon. I stumbled out of the loft inside Room 472 at Devereux Hall, St. Bonaventure University, opened it. The pale hallway light was blinding. It had been a long night.
Before me, a skinny kid was extending his hand.
“Hi! I’m Adrian Wojnarowski!” he said, with exactly the amount of enthusiasm you’d expect from someone who was exactly two hours into his freshman year. “I want to write for you.”
I was the editor of the school paper. Adrian explained through the fog that he had just moved in a few doors down and he wanted to write sports for The Bona Venture. I growled something about coming to a meeting Tuesday night.
I asked him his name again.
“My friends call me Woj,” he said.
Thirty-seven years later — almost to the day, now that I think about it — I went outside to walk my dog for a few minutes. And when I returned, I was shocked to discover close to 175 text messages. That is usually a terrible omen.
In this case, it was a wonderful one.
A few months ago, Woj had called me and asked, “What would you say if I told you …”
And now, he had actually done it. He had greeted the day with a pair of Woj Bombs: he was retiring from ESPN, where for the last seven years he set a hard-to-fathom standard for owning a beat, in his case the NBA. But he was also announcing that he was returning to our shared alma mater to become the GM of the Bonnies men’s basketball team.
Now the world knew that, too.
And it felt like half that world was sharing the news — really, its fascination with the news — on my iPhone. What was I feeling? What was I thinking?
Well, it wasn’t long after that initial meeting that Woj and I discovered that we were, in just about every way, of identical makeups. We were both the products of working-class families who’d instilled in us insatiable work ethics. We both were fascinated by the craft of sportswriting; he, in fact, had already gotten a head start as an intern writing high school sports at the Hartford Courant.
And we both had dreams.
Jesus, did we have dreams.
And for the next few years, over a countless supply of beers at The Burton — our favorite off-campus watering hole — and endless late-night tuna melt sandwiches at a nearby Perkins, we talked about those dreams.
Later, as my professional pathway took me to Olean, N.Y., and Fayetteville, Ark., and Middletown, N.Y., and Kansas City — and his took him to Waterbury, Conn., and then Fresno, Calif. — we would talk it out some more over the phone, 2 a.m. calls in which he’d read me his latest column and I’d read him mine. I’m still paying off the long-distance bills.
Then, in the days when you had to actually pay for every minute of dial-up internet, we’d do the same online, sometimes joined by a gallery of like-minded friends like Les Carpenter (now of the Washington Post), all of us fueled by ambition and the kind of wistful hope that someday those aspirations would find willing suitors at a big-city paper.
Miraculously, it did. Miraculously, for three giddy years, Woj was the columnist at the Bergen Record and I had the same job at the Newark Star-Ledger, and now we were battling over the same turf, the same stories, every day. It was a glorious time. Then I got the call I’d waited my whole life for, at The Post.
And Woj?
Well, he went another way. Back in the day, Woj had won some kind of scholarship and instead of applying that windfall as it was intended — either toward his tuition or toward our bar bill at The Burton — he went straight to the Radio Shack and bought himself his very own TRS-80 (with the flip screen). For a time, for inspiration, he taped a picture of Peter Vecsey on the side of the laptop.
Vecsey had essentially invented modern basketball reporting in the ‘70s here at The Post. And starting in 2006, when Woj left the Record for Yahoo!, he went about the business of doing the same thing, for a whole new generation. Later, when he moved to ESPN, he became proprietor of the Woj Bomb.
(I have long enjoyed relating the story of being his wing man on the first Woj Bomb ever. Up at school, we’d learned the basketball coach was getting fired. We had the story cold. But it was Wednesday, and The BV didn’t publish till Friday. So Woj had an idea: let’s call the three Buffalo TV stations. The one that agrees to credit the paper for the story gets the news. And so it was.)
As his friend, as godfather to his son, Ben, I never thought I’d be prouder than seeing him scale those professional heights. I was wrong. Wednesday, he walked away on top. In his own way, in his own world, he was Jim Brown, leaving at the top of his game, leaving them wanting more. Brown decided he wanted to try acting. Woj is going to do his best to keep our Bonnies competitive in a college basketball landscape that changes by the moment.
It’s all come remarkably full circle, and in more ways than you’d believe. He sent me a picture the other day of his new crash pad near the Bonaventure campus. It’s a very nice apartment.
Upstairs from the Burton, of course.
