“You have to write what you see,” said Greg Hoard. “Because 5,000 other people saw the same thing you saw.” (Press Pros Feature Photos)
A man who made Press Pros so much better has passed…former Buckeye baseball beat writer, baseball nostalgic, and matchless friend died yesterday at 73.
Arlington, TX – Over the years, since 2010, I’ve written thousands of posts for this website, and many of them very gloomy.
But today is perhaps the gloomiest, as it’s my sad duty to share to all of the Ohio State baseball readers since 2014…and to those who enjoyed his matchless story-telling of baseball nostalgia…that our friend and long-time colleague Greg Hoard, has died at age 73.
He was professional, funny, and self-deprecating. After years of covering Indiana University basketball for a small paper in Columbus, Indiana…and a beat writer for the Reds…he once called himself “your average over-educated redneck sports writer from southern Indiana.”
“That song,” he’d tell me (sung by Johnny Russell), “about rednecks, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer, they wrote that for me.” And then he’d just laugh about it. His favorite restaurant was Waffle House.
But while never one to take himself too seriously, he took the art of writing, and writing sports very seriously. Hal McCoy, a contemporary of his while he and Hoard wrote competing columns as daily reporters for the Cincinnati Reds, called him “a wordsmith.”
His grasp for saying things truthfully, and in exactly the right way, was as uncanny as it was charming.
He covered the Reds for both the Cincinnati Post and the Enquirer from 1979 through ’89, and had that knack of getting a quote or a story when no one else could. Hoard always had the angle or the relationship. And people like Bobby Knight – of all people – trusted him enough that Hoard could just pick up the phone and call him.
“We were sitting in a hotel room one night in Columbus when he said, “Let’s call Bob Costas.” And he did. And Costas picked up the phone and they talked for thirty minutes.
And after writing the Reds for all those years he left that beat to take up a different journalistic challenge in television as the sports anchor for WXIX, in Cincinnati.
“It was a waste of his talent,” says Hal McCoy. “He was good on TV, but Hoardie was a writer.”
And then in the winter of 2014 Chick Ludwig sent me a text, urging, “Call Greg Hoard. I think he’d like to work with you at Press Pros.”
It was the best call I’ve ever made, because for the next seven years he became the principal writer for Ohio State baseball on the site, a job that he claimed was as fulfilling as any baseball beat he’d ever pursued.
Hoard with then Ohio State coach Greg Beals, talking baseball in Florida, 2017.
“This is the purest form of baseball I’ve known since I played high school baseball,” he’d say. “These kids actually appreciate the coverage.” And he spent countless weekends in Columbus holed up in the Red Roof Inn on Rome-Hilliard Road crafting stories about names like Tim Wetzel, Joe Ciamacca, and Dom Canzone with that same wordsmith quality with which he written about Pete Rose and Tony Perez.
A former college pitcher himself at Hanover College (in Indiana), he could relate perfectly to the ups and downs of playing the sport in what he called “in-between land”, meaning those who dreamed of playing signing a professional contract.
He was so genuine with his passion for the work that he once told me, “There’s two guys that I really enjoyed talking baseball with. One was Tommy Lasorda and the other was Greg Beals, sitting on that freakin’ back-breaking couch in the players’ lounge at Ohio State.”
But many readers of the site who were baseball fans remember him for the nostalgic stories about the icons that Hoard grew up revering, and later came to know…Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Al Kaline, Orlando Cepeda, Tony Perez, and of course, Willie Mays.
And his stories of learning the game, himself, as an adolescent playing in a pasture field with his friends…”We used cow patties for bases,” he’s say. “So there wasn’t much sliding. When Pete Rose hit Ray Fosse in the All-Star game…well, it was kind of like that.”
But the greatest thing Hoardie ever did for me was teach me the tenents of how to write. With a masters degree in journalism from Emory University, in Atlanta, Hoard was a stickler for writing with flair and without filter.
“You have to write what you see,” he told me early on in our relationship. “You have to name names, and you have to tell the truth. Because there’s 5,000 people who saw the same thing you saw and they’re going to know you lied if you don’t write it.”
And he told me once, “Journalism is not hand-holding.”
He left the Ohio State beat in 2021 because of declining health, and survived several surgeries and spinal epidurals to restore circulation and kill pain in his legs and back. I last saw him a couple of years ago because he was very conscious of his condition, and I don’t think he wanted me to see him in decline.
Publisher Sonny Fulks writes the Big Ten and Buckeyes baseball for Press Pros Magazine.com.
And yet, we’d talk by phone, sometimes by the hour…the same Hoardie reminding me that “baseball had done more for more people than the shot for polio.”
“Keep doing what you love,” he said two weeks ago, when I last spoke with him.
I told him that I loved him…and I meant it, for his support and patience as a friend, mentor, and confidant. I was sitting in the press box at Globe Life Park yesterday when Hal McCoy whispered to me, “I just heard that Hoardie died.”
Hal was visibly shaken, and tears welled up in my eyes as I listened. I’m not ashamed. He meant that much to both of us…and to everyone who ever loved baseball and his matchless story-telling.
I hope somewhere he’s found Musial, Mantle, and Mays. I hope he’s talking baseball with Lasorda. And I hope people never forget him.
I won’t!
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