Published: Friday, July 5, 2013 at 10:39 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, July 5, 2013 at 10:39 a.m.
Sportswriter Chuck Carree will head off to cover a Wilmington Hammerheads soccer game at Legion Stadium. He'll file his story, probably well ahead of deadline as usual.
And that will be it ? after 35 years of covering athletics along the Lower Cape Fear.
Carree is retiring officially on Saturday. He'll still step in to cover the occasional game as a correspondent, according to sports editor Dan Spears. The Hammerheads game, however, will cap a full-time sports writing career that began on Groundhog Day 1978 ? enough time for Carree to have covered both fathers and sons on the field.
Hammerheads owner Bill Rudisill is marking the event by asking Carree to present Saturday night's game ball.
"Chuck's going to be sorely missed," said Joe Miller, retired athletic director for New Hanover County schools. "He's one of the most recognized names in Southeastern North Carolina."
"He's one of the good ones," said veteran football coach Glenn Sasser.
Carree had covered Michael Jordan's career from his days at Laney High School to his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. He tracked Trot Nixon from his playing days at New Hanover High School and American Legion Baseball to the Boston Red Sox. He saw the early days of New Hanover basketball star, future Phoenix Suns player and pro coach Kenny Gattison and those of NFL defensive end Clyde Simmons. He tracked dozens of local baseball players as they advanced through the minor and major leagues.
StarNews community editor Si Cantwell hailed Carree as "a big chunk of the StarNews' institutional memory." Spears, his editor quickly agreed.
"He never seems to forget a name," Spears said, "or the one fact you absolutely have to remember about someone."
Spears, who's been at the StarNews for seven years, said Carree had helped him, and other reporters who were newcomers to the community, to get up to speed with the local sports scene.
"He never held it over you that he knew more than you did," Spears said. "It was just so natural for him to want to help you. He made everyone's job so much easier."
Area coaches echoed colleagues' praise.
"Chuck was always extremely cordial," said Mark Scalf, head baseball coach for the University of North Carolina Wilmington. "He treated coaches and players fairly. Chuck looked at sports as more than a job. He took a real interest in the teams and the players he covered."
"He's the only newspaperman that some coaches trusted," said Joey Price, head football coach at Wallace-Rose Hill High School. "He wrote what you said, not what he thought you said. He never wrote a news story to hurt anybody."
"I didn't agree with everything he wrote, but he was accurate," said Dean Saffos, who knew Carree while coaching at E.E. Smith High School in Jacksonville, Hoggard High School and East Columbus High School. "He treats you fairly and he writes what he sees."
"You know, coaches get angry, and sometimes they say things they shouldn't have said," Sasser said. "Some reporters will just write that down and print it. Chuck was the sort of person who'd ask, ?Hey, do you want to think about that again?'"
Fellow reporters marveled at Carree's encyclopedic knowledge. Former StarNews sports editor Brian Hendrickson said Carree's source list contained phone numbers for hundreds of players, coaches and athletic figures.
"He had home numbers, work numbers," Hendrickson said. "I'm sure he had vacation numbers."
Newsroom legend had it that Carree had a private number for John Wooden, who coached UCLA to 10 NCAA basketball championships. Hendrickson thought it was a myth ? until he found the number on the list.
Carree confirmed the Wooden story.
"And he always called me back," he recalled at an office retirement party.
Another name on Carree's list was coach and sportscaster Dick Vitale. Vitale always returned calls, too, Carree said ? although his phone manner is rather low-key compared to his on-air performances.
A native of Spartanburg, S.C., Carree grew up playing sandlot baseball and football. The sports writing bug bit in high school, where he phoned in scores to the Associated Press. He wrote for the student papers at Spartanburg Methodist College, where he graduated in 1975, and at the University of South Carolina, where he picked up a journalism degree in 1977. While still in college, he worked part-time for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.
Carree said one of his most memorable stories came in 1984, when the UNCW Seahawks were frozen out of the ECAC baseball tournament. He had to break the news to coach Bobby Guthrie, who hadn't yet heard. Another was tracking reports in the 1980s that boosters were slipping money to Seahawk basketball players for meals on the road, an NCAA infraction.
In 1999, Carree took the lead in compiling the StarNews' "Athletes of the Century" series. His knowledge and his contact list made the whole project possible, Spears said.
The only time Spears ever saw Carree flustered was when a football player's father showed up at the newspaper office with a sheriff's deputy to serve Carree with a restraining order. Carree had been following a tip that the boy was playing at one high school but actually lived in another school's district.
"The dad was arguing that his 6-foot-5, 300-pound son was frightened by Chuck," Spears said.
Few others seemed to have that reaction.
"When I first got to Wilmington," recalled copy editor Merton Vance., "one of the first things I realized was that everybody knew Chuck. Everybody."
Before his marriage to Paige Owens, Carree was such a regular at the old Bennigan's on South College Road that the restaurant put a plaque at his regular seat.
Earlier this week, at an informal ceremony, StarNews Publisher Bob Gruber presented Carree with an autographed baseball signed by his hero, longtime Los Angeles Dodgers announcer Vin Scully.
Carree said one of his retirement projects will be a book-length biography of Jack Holley, the winningest high school football coach in North Carolina history. Holley, a former teammate of Roman Gabriel's at New Hanover High School, died May 20 at his home in Teachey at the age of 74.
Ben Steelman: 343-2208
Source: http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20130705/articles/130709799
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