Ten Years of Celebrating Shirley Povich at Maryland
Each fall, the Povich Center and the Merrill College welcome large audiences to participate in the annual Povich Symposium, named after Shirley Povich, an award winning sports reporter and columnist who worked at The Washington Post for 75 years and impacted the careers of many of today’s top journalists.
“Shirley was a living, breathing column,” former Washington Post columnist and current ESPN television personality Michael Wilbon said. “There was no bigger or better endorsement.”
This year’s Povich Symposium is Nov.10 in the Samuel Riggs Alumni Center at the University of Maryland and will mark the tenth year that the symposium has been on the University of Maryland campus.
The symposium will feature a panel that includes Wilbon, Tony Kornheiser and Jeremy Schaap from ESPN, USA Today’s Christine Brennan, and The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins and Chelsea Janes.
The panel will be moderated by Shirley Povich’s son, Maury Povich. There will also be opening remarks by Donald Graham, the former owner of The Washington Post.
“[The Symposium] started when we decided to honor my father,” Maury Povich said.
Four years after Shirley Povich passed away in 1998, the symposium was created by the Povich family and spent its first several years at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center, including guests such as sportscaster Bob Costas and sportswriter Dave Kindred.
The event moved to the University of Maryland in 2006 and has since been an event in the community where student journalists can meet and interact with professional journalists, celebrate journalism excellence listen to wide-ranging discussion on issues in sports.
“It’s the flagship event for the Povich Center,” Washington Post columnist and Merrill College visiting professor Kevin Blackistone said.
“It’s really been informative and entertaining because of the issues that have been discussed in a public forum and the people who have been involved with it talk about the issues, Blackistone said. “It’s become something that people look forward to every year.”
Each year, the symposium has a specific theme. Themes from previous years have included racism in sports, Maryland’s move to the Big Ten and the positives and negatives of intercollegiate athletics.
This year’s theme is “Sportswriting: Then and Now” and will discuss how sportswriting has changed recently in the age of social media.
“Game day stories have changed dramatically. There are so many ways to get results. Blogs have gotten big and sportswriters tweet during games now,” Maury Povich said.
Even with all of the technological advances at the disposal of sports journalists today, Maury Povich said that good writing is what continues to be at the core of a good story.
“I still think the written word is the written word. My father believed that you as a writer, you’re going to give an observation that was very personal, and personal to you.”
Wilbon, Kornheiser, Jenkins, and Brennan all worked for The Washington Post at the same time that Shirley Povich was continuing to write columns during the 1980s and 1990s. Brennan said she looked forward to her daily interactions with Povich, ranging from a simple conversation to a comment on an article.
“When Shirley Povich said ‘nice story’ or ‘good job,’ that just meant everything,” Brennan said. “To have Shirley as our mentor, you really felt you walked into the pages of a journalism textbook when you walked into the Washington Post.”
Wilbon agreed with Brennan and said that Povich also taught him areas of the journalism profession that extended beyond putting ink to a piece of paper or typing a large amount of words in a small amount of time.
“You learn how to behave yourself. How to dress. How to interact. What better person could you learn from then Shirley Povich? He was always there for questions,” Wilbon said.
Maury Povich spent a lot of time around both his father and sports from a young age. He started hanging around ballparks when he was seven, became a batboy for the Washington Senators and watched his father work as the Senators beat writer. Maury Povich said his father would write a game story, a column and a sidebar story for The Washington Post everyday for six days a week.
“I was in the pressbox as my father wrote,” Povich said. “He was the kind of writer that was so self-critical. He’d probably be one of the last writers to leave.”
Carl Sessions Stepp, an adjunct professor at the Merrill College and a former reporter for The Charlotte Observer and USA Today said that Shirley Povich and other great sports columnists in his era had the ability to humanize and bring color and depth to their work.
“Povich could cover news and provide insight into how sports connected with larger reality,” Stepp said.
Blackistone credits the opportunity for student journalists from the Merrill College and members of the nearby community to interact and have a discussion with major figures in the world of sports for the big success of the Povich Symposium. He named Wilbon and ESPN sportscaster and former University of Maryland student Scott Van Pelt as examples of professional sports journalists who have gone out of their way to share some wisdom with Maryland’s student journalists.
“Michael Wilbon and Scott Van Pelt have been extremely gracious with their time AFTER these events to hobnob with the students,” Blackistone said.
“What other college would you get that opportunity?”
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More Information on this year’s Symposium panelists by Bo Evans
Christine Brennan
Christine Brennan is a columnist for USA Today, author of several books and a commentator for ABC News, CNN, PBS News Hour and NPR. When Brennan began her career at the Miami Herald in 1981 after attending Northwestern University. Brennan thought she would cover politics, but after seeing other women covering sports at the Daily Northwestern, began to consider a career as a sportswriter. When Brennan came to The Washington Post in 1985 she was assigned to cover the National Football League. She later covered the Washington Redskins for The Post. After writing several books on figure skating, Brennan left The Post and became a columnist with the USA Today. She was one of the founders of the organization, the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM).
Tony Kornheiser
Tony Kornheiser is the co-host of “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN and radio show “The Tony Kornheiser Show” on ESPN-980. Kornheiser has been covering sports for over 40 years, starting with Newsday and then the New York Times. He came to The Washington Post in 1979 as a general assignment reporter in sports and became a full-time columnist in 1984. Kornheiser’s columns were known for their wit and personality, as his his television and radio shows. His 1991 “Bandwagon columns were a well-received collection of thoughts on why the Redskins were the best team in the league that year, starting with the first game of the season. The Redskins won the Super Bowl in Minneapolis in 1992 after Kornheiser rode a 33-foot “bandwagon” the 1,150 miles from Washington D.C. to Minneapolis to cover the game. It was this kind of tongue-in-cheek commentary that led fans to follow Kornheiser as he moved from print to radio and television.
Michael Wilbon
Michael Wilbon is the co-host of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” and a NBA studio analyst for “Inside the NBA”. Wilbon knew from a young age that he wasn’t going to be a biologist or an engineer. But he had a skill for language that allowed him to tell stories that people were interested in. For Wilbon, the interest was sports. Wilbon was an intern at The Washington Post during the summers of 1979 and 1980 before being hired full time as a sports reporter. During his career at The Post he covered the major colleges in the area, including the University of Maryland. He also covered the National Football League and the Baltimore Orioles before becoming a columnist in 1990. Wilbon’s style contrasts with his partner, Tony Kornheiser. Where Kornheiser often use jokes to point to the truth, Wilbon uses his space and time to comment on the culture of sports. Wilbon has said the most important sports story of his career was covering the aftermath of the death of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias. In his final column with The Post, Wilbon points out that people of a certain age mark time with the death of Bias like many people do with the death of John F. Kennedy.
Sally Jenkins
Sally Jenkins is a columnist for The Washington Post and author of 12 books. Jenkins gained her love of sports writing from traveling with her father Dan Jenkins. Jenkins would spend all summer and one week during the school year with her father watching him cover sports. Jenkins says rather than being pushed to follow her father, she inherited the career and picked it up gradually. Jenkins wrote, “It’s Not About the Bike” with Lance Armstrong, the cyclist’s autobiography. After Armstrong admitted to doping in 2013, questions arose about chapters in the book that covered claims Armstrong was doping, which the cyclist denied. Jenkins said despite this she doesn’t bear any ill will towards Armstrong. Jenkins also had the last interview with Penn State coach Joe Paterno before he died—after Paterno had had been fired amid the controversy surrounding the Jerry Sandusky scandal.
Chelsea Janes
Chelsea Janes is a sports reporter for The Washington Post covering the Washington Nationals. While playing softball at Yale Janes fell into a career of sports journalism after she volunteered to write a story about the school mascot when a friend was too busy to make a deadline. After that Janes got a beat covering the field hockey team and was a columnist with the Yale Daily News. After receiving an M.A. in journalism from Stanford and interning with The Post, Janes became a full time reporter covering high school sports. She then moved on to covering the Nationals.
Jeremy Schaap
Jeremy Schaap is a senior news correspondent with ESPN. He also contributes to ESPN shows “E:60”, “Outside the Lines”, and “NFL Countdown”. Schaap is an experienced and much decorated reporter. His work has shined a light on issues ranging for sexual assaults committed against lesbians in South Africa, inhumane working conditions of labourers in Qatar while the country prepares for the 2022 FIFA World Cup and the scandals and corruption involved with the FIFA executive leadership, including FIFA President Sepp Blatter. Schaap has been awarded and lauded for what many consider his fair and balanced approach to reporting important stories.
