LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Well, let’s get this over with. There will be some tributes to Rick Bozich coming ahead of his retirement next week. I haven’t particularly looked forward to the task (or the reality), and am just as happy to bat leadoff – then step out of the way.
The thing about writing is that you have to get away. If you write from the middle of a thing, sometimes it’s too overwrought and sentimental. So you’ve got to keep it simple and a bit detached, to try and let your words have some power. But there are some people and things who are so large in your life that there’s no stepping away.
For me, Rick is one of those.
This isn’t a column about me. But it’s going to start with me.
I showed up to interview at The Courier-Journal in 1990 for a sports clerk’s job. Bottom rung on the journalism ladder. Harry Bryan, sports editor, asked me what I saw myself doing in the business. I told him I wanted to be a reporter and that I wasn’t really aiming for a job writing my opinion.
About that time Rick Bozich walked by his door. “Hey Bozich, this kid says you’re too opinionated!” he shouted.
First day in a newspaper office and I’m already misquoted. And probably ticked off the big Serbian guy.
Skip ahead about 16 years.
I thought I was going for an interview to be the sports columnist at The Courier-Journal. I’d already been passed over for the job once. I was used to being passed over by the newspaper I grew up reading – it happened three times in the 1990s before I finally got a chance to come back and cover the University of Louisville.
So, I showed up at the Café Metro in the Highlands. It was July 26, 2006. I was supposed to be meeting with Harry Bryan and managing editor Ben Post. But Harry said Ben couldn’t make it and there was Bozich, sitting in.
Harry said, “I really have only one question. What makes you think you should be our (expletive) sports columnist?”
Eric Crawford and Rick Bozich during a 2011 promotional shoot.
Courier-Journal
The waiter came to get our drink orders, giving me a second to think of a clever comeback. I ordered an iced tea, and Harry stopped me.
“You’re going to have to order something stronger than that,” he said, “because you got the job.”
We all laughed. And shook hands. And we enjoyed a dinner on the newspaper.
I think the only reservation Harry may have had is that Rick and I thought too much alike, or so he thought.
But he hired me anyway, and since August 6, 2006, when my first column appeared in the newspaper, I have worked alongside Rick Bozich. We’d worked together well before that, in my 6 ½ years at the paper. But now I moved into the office next door, along 6th Street.
Over time, our styles weren’t too similar, after all. He was the Serbian tough guy who always wrote the right thing at the right time. I was the local guy who was trying to grow into the job – like a kid wearing his big brother’s clothes.
And now, that brother is packing up his half of the office we’ve shared for the past 13 years. But I’m jumping ahead in the story.
I wouldn’t have made the move to television had Bozich not agreed to make the move too. We got tired of watching our co-workers being laid off. And frankly, I didn’t feel too comfortable in the position of No. 2 sports columnist because eventually some accountant was bound to come along and say, “Why do we need two?”
So we left. It was a whole thing. They were none too happy with us at the newspaper. We had to sneak back in with the help of a former co-worker to get the rest of the stuff out of our offices. Or maybe we just did that.
So here we came. Trying to talk on TV and write. There were five of us in a tiny office, and Bozich and I would meet at what we called “satellite offices,” Quill’s Coffee, quite a bit, or others. I worked a lot out of the old Starbucks in the Seelbach Hotel. I do remember that the first TV feature he did won him an Emmy. Some of us transitioned better than others.
Eric Crawford and Rick Bozich in a September 2015 promotional shoot for WDRB Sports.
WDRB promo
When WDRB built a large expansion, they included an office for us. I can’t say we’ve spent a ton of time there. Maybe we’re there an hour a day, on average.
But those hours have been important. They’ve largely kept us sane, I think, through events you would not have believed if we wrote them as a book of fiction. But a lot of you were there with us. So you know.
Probably 85 percent of my interaction with Bozich occurs outside of those hours, and that won’t change on Tuesday when he walks out of the building into his next chapter. He might call it retirement, but you don’t just turn it off. Writers write.
But I am going to miss those hours in the office. Because I’ll tell you, no matter what craziness we were covering or experiencing – wins and losses, coaching changes, coaching searches, scandals, championships, even life and death – the guy in that room didn’t change.
Bozich is not a complicated person. White Sox. Hoosiers. Ginger Ale.
Don’t mess with his candy or his parking pass and you’ll be fine. A good concierge lounge is a rare indulgence.
He is also the most decent man I know.
He’s loyal. I played the bad cop with Kenny Payne. He played the bad cop with Rick Pitino. In all these years, we never had a disagreement over who would do what.
After a couple of Halls of Fame and a story announcing his retirement, I don’t know how much there is left to say about Rick that I haven’t said. I could tell you about the night he got his pills mixed up and realized halfway to the KFC Yum! Center that he’d taken a sleeping pill. I don’t know how he did it, but he managed to chat up referee Tom O’Neill during every timeout and write a decent game story anyway. Baller.
He’d shout to Tom to come over and I’d tell him to pipe down, he was drawing too much attention. He said, “That’s Tom. That’s my guy.”
Eric Crawford and Rick Bozich in a 2011 promotional shoot for The Courier-Journal.
The Courier-Journal
When North Carolina came to town, Roy Williams found Bozich. We got a call in the office once. It was a staffer for Mike Krzyzewski. The coach wanted Bozich to come on his podcast. Often, the call would come from Howard Schnellenberger later in life. He just wanted to talk.
There was the time that the newspaper made us stay back in Memphis after a Louisville Liberty Bowl win to try to confront this high school football coach over payments that Kentucky was allegedly making. They faxed us copies of the money orders at a Kinkos or somewhere. We went to the house. Staked it out a little. Then went to knock on the door. The last thing I remember him telling me was, “If he has dogs, I’m out of here.”
There’s no one more dogged when news is breaking. He’ll wear out the phone lines, long after my contact list is exhausted.
Bozich is not prone to displays of emotion, other than the occasional fit of rage. Though, there is a certain Chicago White Sox documentary on the 2005 World Series title that he will watch like it’s Pride of the Yankees.
I worry less about him as he gears down a bit than I do about the rest of us, and this business. Many of the most dedicated and talented journalists in Louisville are spread throughout the city – not doing journalism. It’s a concern.
I started out in a sports department with 21 writers — all so sharp, you had to bring your “A game” just to keep up. At the NCAA Super Regional a few weeks ago, Bozich and I were a department of two. And I still felt like I had to bring my “A game,” because of the guy next to me.
When I had a route for The Louisville Times, I delivered papers that contained his stories.
How lucky am I, to have had such proximity to a Hall of Fame life and career? Luckier still, for his friendship and support.
The other day, talk turned to the 50-year anniversary of the Kentucky Colonels ABA championship win over the Indiana Pacers. Rick had covered it for the Anderson (Ind.) Bulletin. He was making $93 a week after taxes. He paid $135 a month to live upstairs in a house. No AC. No shower, just a tub. No bed, but a fold-out couch. For a guy who is 6-4. Two-man staff, six days a week. Somebody had to be in there by 7 a.m. every morning to put the paper together.
The hours haven’t gotten much better in any of those years since.
But I can tell you this – he never counted them. Never has.
And I can tell you he loves the work. And if you ever had the sneaking feeling that you were annoying him, you almost certainly were. And I can tell you that he cared probably more than you knew.
And I can tell you that when the afternoon rolls around and he doesn’t walk into that office we’ve shared, it’s going to take me an awful long time to adjust, probably as long as whatever time I have left to occupy it.
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