By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL
Written for the LSWA
He was a chaperone, only eight years old at the time, but the boy was fascinated by all the things a newsroom had to offer in the 1960s.
The smoke of the cigarette. The hammering of the typewriter. The click of the ticker. Above all, the talk.
Grown men talking about grown man things.
“I would sit there with my dad and all the sportswriters,” he says today, “and just take it all in.”
Until one day, Bud Montet, then sports editor of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, called the boy and handed him a few pieces of paper. “Can you write me four or five paragraphs about this BREC softball game?” —Montet asked.
And the boy set about that task on a manual typewriter, two fingers searching and pecking all the time, with the mission of creating the best story of a BREC softball game ever written by an eight-year-old.
“I knew then,” Ron Higgins says today, “that this is what I wanted to do.”
It has led him to the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame by receiving the 2024 Distinguished Service in Sports Journalism Award. He is part of the 12-member Class of 2024 that will be honored June 20-22 in Natchitoches. For participation opportunities, visit LaSportsHall.com or call 318-238-4255.
***
Fittingly, there’s a story about how Higgins got his start as a sports writer because he’s all about stories.
Although he still uses that hunt-and-peck style he learned when he was eight, Higgins doesn’t write with his fingers.
Write with your eyes.
Write with your ears.
And write from the heart.
(Your fingers just do the dirty work.)
There are stories about covering games across the South, stories about interview subjects no one else had heard of, and stories about situations he simply stumbled into. But before he could read it, he first had to see it. Hear it. Feel it.
In a 45-year career that has included 11 incredible stops along the way, Higgins still has a hard time deciding what he loves most about covering sports.
Maybe it’s the big games. Or the extravagant dates. Or give a harsh opinion when the situation requires it. Or the stories that go unnoticed and that, according to him, no one else seems to know.
“I’ve always loved feature films,” he says. “But of course, I like the immediacy of a really good game story. I love covering events because you never know what’s going to happen in a game. That’s the beauty of it and you can write it that way. And I like writing columns because I’m opinionated. When you’ve done it as long as I have, you have a pretty good perspective. I wish I had that perspective 30 or 40 years ago.”
Maybe even more than that.
Higgins had signed articles before obtaining his driver’s license. (“My mother would drop me off at games and come back to pick me up,” she says.) He would go to the locker room after games and the football coaches thought he was the towel boy.
There is no longer a doubt. Higgins will be in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, alongside sports and sports writing heroes from his youth and throughout his career.
“Even after they told me, I had a hard time believing it,” Higgins says. “There are many other people in this state, which has had a history of great writers, who I think deserve it more. But I feel really honored to have been selected. It has been the work of my life. “It’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid.”
***
Do you want stories? Let’s start.
On January 11, 1980, Higgins had a morning appointment to speak with LSU defensive coordinator Greg Williams. Fresh out of college and a 1979 LSU graduate, Higgins was working for Tiger Rag and didn’t bother to listen to television or the radio that morning as he headed to the LSU football office.
When he arrived, he could instantly sense that something was wrong.
“I walked in and everyone was crying and I asked them what happened,” Higgins recalls. “That’s when they told me Bo’s plane had crashed.”
Bo Rein, who had been hired just two months earlier, had left Shreveport the night before to return to Baton Rouge after a recruiting trip and the plane he was traveling on crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. (The cause of the accident was probably cabin depressurization resulting in a lack of oxygen.)
“I didn’t even know what to say at the time,” Higgins says. “I realized that I don’t think I can encounter anything worse than this.”
He explained that he had a date with Williams. They told him that Williams was in his office and, surprisingly, had put Rein on the plane the night before in Shreveport.
Williams invited Higgins to his office. “The only thing I asked him was, ‘What happened?’” he says. “And he just started talking.”
Less than a year after finishing college, Higgins was listening to a man who had just lost one of his best friends and could have easily been on board that plane if he hadn’t made other last-minute plans.
It’s not exactly a situation they teach you in a journalism classroom.
Higgins followed up with Williams, who had retired as a coach, for a thoughtful 2015 story that won first place in the LSWA’s annual writing contest.
Do you want another story?
In 2019, Higgins was working for NOLA.com and knew a personal trainer who had a story to tell about one of his clients.
Joe Este was a kid from New Orleans who came from a tough background, but had managed to earn a football scholarship at Tennessee-Martin. He discovered that his mother was homeless and living in a car in a casino parking lot. He also had two nephews who were basically orphans because Este’s sister had a drug addiction.
“He decided to raise those kids while playing football at Tennessee-Martin,” Higgins says. “I was 21 years old. Every day he raised those two children and they became like the mascots of the football team. He managed to graduate, then got a chance with the (Tennessee) Titans and stayed there for about a month.”
Which was a nice story and made for a good video package on the 10 o’clock news. But Higgins’ story went beyond that.
“I wanted to adopt those children but I didn’t know how,” she says. “When my story was published, all these people, including lawyers, called me to help him adopt the children. In the end he did it and raised them as his children.”
Okay, one more…
While working in Memphis, Higgins went to the U.S. Olympic baseball training facility in Millington, Tennessee. “They had open trials,” Higgins says. “And anyone could try it.”
Anyone did it… and his name was Lonnie Altman.
“I saw this guy playing shortstop in an old flannel uniform,” Higgins says. “He was probably about 40 years old. And it was horrible.”
Altman was in a van in the parking lot. “His whole life was spent in the van,” says Higgins. “He even had a picture of his mother on the dashboard.”
Then Higgins asked the obvious and not-so-subtle question: “Why are you here?”
“My mother always wanted me to be a baseball player,” Altman told him. “I know I’m not very good, but I wanted to make my mother proud.”
***
hIggins has worked for more than one newspaper in the same city (Shreveport), twice in the same city (“I came back and replaced myself in Memphis,” he says), Mississippi, Alabama and all kinds of publications in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
He has seen a lot in journalism because there is a lot to see. And not everything is good, in his opinion.
“I have reluctantly tried not to adapt to the new journalism,” he says. “I still believe in the value of a good story that is not written in tweets. I still believe that people like to read really good stories. “I can’t stand some of the new fast food journalism that’s being forced to present now because its bosses think things need to be made simpler for readers.”
In 2008, he served as president of the Soccer Writers Association of America. He remains the only Louisiana native to hold that position.
Higgins is also a ten-time Tennessee Sports Writer of the Year. He was inducted into the Tennessee Sportswriters Hall of Fame in 2011.
He didn’t earn those honors by writing stories titled “Three Things You Should Know About…”
“Everything is a list of five observations,” says Higgins. “They don’t think people have time to read anything, so they simplify it as much as possible. I still believe that there are literate people who like to read good stories. When you come across a really good story to tell and you know it’s going to be conveyed that way, it kind of renews your faith in what you’re doing.”
And don’t get him started on limited media access. Gone, for the most part, are the days of interviews in front of a player’s locker.
“Access is terrible,” says Higgins. “There is no access and that is what is lost. Some of the best dates you’ll ever get are in locker rooms because they weren’t on a platform or in front of a ton of cameras. There was no moderator asking questions and he was not controlled because your coach was not sitting next to you.”
***
And the reason that young man was in smoke-filled newsrooms in the 1960s? This is because Ron’s father was Ace Higgins, who was the longtime Sports Information Director at LSU.
In those days, Ace Higgins went to the Morning Advocate newsroom three times a week and helped write articles to set up the sports section.
But Ace Higgins was much more than that. He was the school’s SID when Billy Cannon won the Heisman Trophy. And when LSU had 13 All-Americans on the first team. And when Pete Maravich came along and changed the way college basketball was played.
Three days before Christmas 1968, Ace Higgins died of a heart attack. He was 45 years old and left behind a 12-year-old son.
“I think about him every day,” says Ron Higgins. “Every press box I walk into, there’s someone who knew him and talks to me about him.”
When Higgins was hired by the Shreveport Journal in December 1982, the second column he wrote was a tribute to his father, Ace.
“My father never intended for me to be a sports journalist,” Higgins says. “So he never really knew how much influence he had on me.”
Or how much influence your child would have on a career as a storyteller.
John James Marshall is a former LSWA president who writes for ShreveportBossierJournal.com.
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