“Mr. Urban, we need a distraction from AZ Sports. I remember awhile back you posted a snippet from your time at the East Valley Tribune. It looks like you scrapbooked a lot of your articles, which is very cool. From your time as a more traditional sports journalist, is there a story that was particularly memorable you worked on, or a story you had to go above and beyond to capture? Chef’s choice. Thanks.”
Wow. That’s a question that has me going down memory lane. One comes to mind first, but unfortunately, that story will have to be held from public consumption, perhaps until I have shuffled off this mortal coil. Definitely until after I no longer have a boss.
I have had the chance to experience some cool things. It was after I came to the team, but Larry Fitzgerald invited me to his house in Minnesota one offseason to do a big story and watch him work out with other NFL players. I loved doing the oral history of the McCown-to-Poole TD in 2003 that knocked the Vikings from the playoffs. But in my previous life? I worked hard on a huge story about Edgerrin James when he first got to the Cardinals (and got rap star Trick Daddy on the phone, and he gave great quotes.) In a different kind of way, I had to go above and beyond for this Rod Tidwell story. (IYKYK).
But as I think about it, there was a story that is memorable, not because it was hard to track down but because it has stuck with me, was a story I wrote about Walt Hoffman. This was back in my days as a high school writer in the late 1990s in Scottsdale. Hoffman was a retired teacher from the Scottsdale School District who spent years going to all the sporting events at the Scottsdale high schools taking photos at freshmen, JV and varsity games — all sports — just so he could give them to the athletes and their parents. So many people knew him in that world.
Walt got cancer. And I wanted to do a story about him, and all he had done for all the kids over the years. I sat at one high school volleyball game with him (he was too sick to be taking photos, so he was just sitting off to the side corner) talking/interviewing him. He was talking about an upcoming surgery he had coming, one he wasn’t sure he’d survive, describing the classical music he wanted playing in the background in case that was the last thing he heard. And a mom and her daughter came over at one point to thank him for everything he had done.