DAVE DORR

MEDIA

Born: March 29, 1938; Denver, Colorado
Position: Writer
Wrote For: St. Louis Post Dispatch, Sports Illustrated, Sporting News

By Ed Wheatley

Born in Colorado and raised in Iowa, Dave Dorr came to St. Louis by way of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. His is a journalistic career that has been heralded in St. Louis and across the nation. The St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame is about honoring our city’s sports heroes. Through his experiences and reporting, Dave became one of those heroes.

Tonight’s induction honors a man that was smack-dab in the middle of some of the most important and memorable sporting moments of our generation. But it was more than his being courtside or along the sidelines. It was what he wrote and how it was written. It was through his columns that Dave brought these moments, the stories, and the athletes into his readers’ homes to become treasured memories.

In 1966, after a brief stop at the Des Moines Register and Tribune, Dave spent the next thirty-five years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. During that period, he was also a special correspondent for Sports Illustrated and a columnist for The Sporting News. Dave’s career resume includes authoring two books, three Pulitzer Prize nominations, and four Hall of Fame inductions. Tonight, will be his fifth.

Dave has covered many different sporting events throughout his career.  He’s reported on golf’s Masters, U.S. Open, and PGA tournaments, as well as Track and Field events across the world. It was, however, his coverage of basketball and the Olympics that stood out. Dave covered nine summer and winter Olympic Games and all NCAA basketball tournaments and Final Fours between 1973 and the mid-1990s.

The Curt Gowdy Media Award is an annual award given by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame to outstanding basketball writers and broadcasters. To non-basketball fans, this Hall of Fame nestled in Springfield, Massachusetts, is basketball’s version of Cooperstown. The award was first presented in 1990.  Dave Dorr was inducted as 1991’s award – winning sportswriter, just the second inductee into a list that has become a who’s who across the world of basketball sports reporting. In addition to being a former president of the United States Basketball Writers Association, Dave also became a charter inductee into its Hall of Fame. Along with these honors, Dave was named Missouri Sportswriter of the Year on multiple occasions.

To borrow from ABC’s Wide World of Sports famous intro, Dave has reported it all, from “the thrill of victory, to the agony of defeat, to the drama of human competition,” and he witnessed one of sports most sobering moments. Dave was there for the thrill of victory, a miracle as it was called in Lake Placid in 1980. He was courtside for the agony of defeat when Olympic gold was stolen from the United States during a Cold War era basketball game in 1972. Dave then reported on the heartbreaking massacre of Israel’s Olympians in Munich’s Olympic Village. There was a touch of hometown pride while chronicling Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s golden Olympic run. And Dave was there for discussions that would lead to the birth of America’s Olympic basketball Dream Team.

On the hardcourt, Dave regularly reported on college basketball’s biggest moments.  One took place in 1973, at St. Louis’s Arena when Bill Walton delivered the game of the century for UCLA’s seventh straight national title. A year later he witnessed UCLA’s one-point loss to Notre Dame that ended their 88-game win streak, and also covered the epic college final between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in 1979. You might say, Dave has seen it all and brought it all to St. Louisans and the nation through his thorough and timely reporting. Welcome to the Hall of Fame.