By Mark Pukalo
Randy Smith, the late-great sportswriter and columnist for the Journal Inquirer, once told a story about the time he stood in front of old Chicago Stadium with Hartford Whalers coach Jack Evans on cold, wintery day.
Evans, who won a Stanley Cup with the Blackhawks in 1961, looked up at the building and said just one word.
Memories.
Why bother using two when one will suffice?
This 62-year-old can do the same at many venues and in dozens of cities and towns. I have done it while watching several athletes on television who I once covered in high school.
Jerry Garcia said, "what a long, strange trip it's been." Yes it has, but my journey as a sportswriter has been quite exhilarating over the past 40 years. I made mistakes along the way, learned from them, made some more, and then tried to correct.
My career has been like a good movie. It made me laugh, think and cry. There was plenty of drama in the first 20-22 years, along with a few moments for horror fans. I may have plenty of regrets about my life in general, but I have very few in my working career - ever since the first day with Shoreline Newspapers on August 12, 1985.
While many of my copy editors would have liked me to use less words like Evans, I have so many stories to tell, people to thank, and I'm not going to keep it to 12 inches. I've got eight blogs. Let's start from the beginning.
Pregame: The Road to a Career in Writing
When I was a little tyke, you could tell that baseball was not going to be my thing. It probably didn't help that during the warmup for a Little League All Star Game in Canterbury, CT , I lost a throw from the right fielder in the blinding sun and it hit me squarely in the face. Dr. Lupien did a great job to save my front two teeth.
However, I loved basketball. I worked on my game day and night and captained the Dr. Helen Baldwin Bulldogs as an eighth grader. Unfortunately, scoring 63 points (yeah, right, ball hog) in a 7th and 8th grade league game was not the first step to the NBA. It must have been the shorts (see left).
The first time I saw my name in print for sports was after my Griswold High freshman basketball team won the QVC Championship game. It read "Mark Pukalo added 10 points." It was my only double-figure effort of that season for our dominant team.
Two years later in 1979, I was starting for the varsity in the season opener. The opponent was St. Bernard, led by Harold Pressley. The big man went on to win a national championship with Villanova and played in the NBA. I was pictured "defending him" in the Norwich Bulletin. The newspaper was where my future was.
That season did not go well for me. But I did earn one claim to fame. I took a charge from Pressley in the second matchup. And, they actually called it! Harold and his coach Rich "Suitcase" Pagliuca were not happy with me. Tough.
I had my 1980 MLB picks published in the Norwich Bulletin under Tom Winters' Sunday column. Two of my four picks came through and the Expos finished one game out.
Even though John Breen, my wise first advisor at UConn, suggested that writers major in English, History, Political Science or something else, I made Journalism my choice. While Breen was great, Maureen Croteau became my best advisor. It wasn't necessarily what she taught me. It was her unending moral support.
I learned and wrote some really bad stories for classes. But the best education was writing for the Daily Campus, working with Bob D'Aprile, Dana Gauruder and others. I covered the women's soccer team as a junior and the men as a senior. The last thing I did was write a column on Big East basketball - The Big East Beat. Jim Boeheim and Gary Williams actually called me back for interviews.
I also spent the last two years doing radio work for WHUS. I loved calling play by play. If that road was not so long to success, I may have taken it. I did dozens of soccer games, a few baseball contests, a UConn-Yale football matchup and was scheduled to do one hockey game against Holy Cross at the old outdoor rink. It never happened. The phone line in the soccer press box did not work.
Basketball was the greatest experience. I did games at the Carrier Dome (the day Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson), St. John's, Seton Hall (me and Scott Bell got lost on the way in Newark and made it just before tipoff), Providence (two of the players rode back to campus with us. ...) and Madison Square Garden. The 1985 Big East tournament at MSG was the highlight. Pearl Washington, Chris Mullin, Patrick Ewing and that Pressley guy were there.
College life was amazing in many ways. During my senior year, and after graduation, I did a talk show on WHUS with Henry Mondschein called "Sports Line." The day Geno Auriemma was hired, we were doing a show. We went to the press conference and asked Geno to come across the street to be a guest on Sports Line. Geno obliged and obviously that was the springboard to his 11 national titles (edit, 12 national titles) and more than 1,000 wins. Had to be.
Memories.
That was a stressful summer, looking for jobs. I helped my father around the farm. I have a vivid memory of watching the Live Aid Concert on TV. Freddie, Bono, Pete, Sade, Bob and Elvis killed it in London, among others.
I had interviews with the Journal Inquirer and the Meriden Record. No dice. I went up to Torrington for another and thought I did really well. But they chose a guy named Tony Dobrowolski with more experience.
You always wonder how your life would have changed with one event. Where would I have gone? What would I have become in and after Torrington? Would I still be there, married, with kids?
Instead, I went after Dobrowolski's former job as sports editor of the Rose City Sentinel in Norwich and the Regional Shopper & Reporter in Colchester - two weeklies in the Shoreline Newspapers chain. I don't remember much about the interview with the unforgettable Hal Levy, except that I was 99 percent sure my professional career was about to begin.
The Shoreline Years: A Great Education, Great People
It's been a long time. It's hard to remember everything from those early days in Norwich, Colchester and Guilford. I know I put a lot of miles on the Cavalier.
My first pro story was a feature on Billy Carpenter, a top player in the Norwich area baseball league. Hal, Paul Nichols and I went to the Yankee Conference football media day in August and then I dove into high school sports.
From the start, I felt more at home in Colchester. Kim Potter (now Ryan) and Silvio Albino were great role models as editors and secretary Barbara Kromish was wonderful to me. I had more schools to cover in that area (six) and developed relationships with many interesting people.
I do remember Sentinel editor Damien Rohrr (not sure about the spelling) allowed each writer a chance to submit a column when they had a good idea. Jim Calhoun came to Norwich to speak at some point after he was hired as UConn men's basketball coach in 1986 and that sounded like a perfect opportunity for me. I really wish I still had that column.
I covered a lot of soccer that first fall, centering on good teams at Lyman Memorial, RHAM and Hale Ray. But perhaps the best two memories from that year were at Griswold and Norwich Free Academy with the Sentinel.
I covered future Baseball Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell playing for Xavier High. I believe he pitched a gem at NFA one afternoon and I used it in the Shopper because he was from Killingworth. The other was the undefeated Griswold football team of coach Paul Giardi.
It is still controversial for some to this day that the Wolverines turned down a trip to the state championship game. However, Griswold had basically 15 players who went both ways and a few got hurt in the final game - an 8-6 win in the mud against 1-8 Gilbert.
I was with them almost all year. Giardi made the right call, even though powerful Ansonia did not reach the final. It would have been fun if the single-wing offense, led by Brian Rentz, got a chance to show its tricks on the big stage for a series or two. But the safety of the kids was more important. They went 11-0. That was enough.
I really dug in my second year. I still have the Fall Sports Preview issue with my giant feature story on RHAM boys soccer coach and AD Mike Zotta.
"This is my life. I love coaching. People don't understand what you can do with a young person's life as a coach," Zotta said. "I like to think of the soccer field as my classroom.. ... You have to equalize the discipline with the hugging."
He was hard-nosed. But Zotta, who also coached girls basketball and softball, cared about the kids. He had a leadoff hitter named Kelly Johnson, who must have posted an on-base percentage of .800 one season with 50+ bases. Sweet kid. Killer on the base paths.
RHAM had a great goal scorer named Joe Nielsen, who later went on to play at UConn. They also had a talented goalkeeper and basketball star named Steve Emt. He was one of the best high school athletes I ever covered. Emt walked on to the UConn basketball team, but at 25 a car accident left him paralyzed. He became a coach and then a Paralympic athlete.
I had a special connection at Hale Ray. I remember covering a night soccer match in my first trip to Moodus between the Little Noises and, big, bad Wheeler. Hale Ray played a very entertaining brand of build-up soccer for coach Charlie Boynton. But that night Wheeler just brutalized them with dirty tackles and the referees never got control of the game.
I also covered coach Lou Milardo's successful softball teams at Hale Ray when I was in Colchester and later saw them win a state championship while at the Hartford Courant. We have since connected on Facebook.
I had some good memories with the Little Noises on the basketball court as well. I'm not sure how it all came about, but I practiced with coach Linda Markesich's girls team a few times. I gave their star player Susie Parker some different competition. Three-sport star. Great kid.
I also enjoyed covering Kevin Maynard's Hale Ray boys, who shocked Putnam in the QVC tournament one year. When the 3-point line was added for high school hoops, I did a story on how it would benefit Hale Ray's long-range shooters Frank Cozean and Eddie Kostoss. The story featured the best headline of my editing layout career.
"It's Bombs Away
At Old Hale Ray"
I worked 70-hour weeks during the seasons. I never got tired of it. I loved what I was doing and I just kept producing copy. We had to put all the stories on disks. It's amazing the extra work that was required to put out a paper back then. At the time, it didn't matter to me.
I had a few stringers, including Rich Zalusky at Bacon Academy. Rich has gone on to have a strong sports writing career. All I did was give him the space to write.
The other top memories from those years?
*Danielle Benoit, a State Open cross country champion in 1986, was from the Regional Shopper area but went to Mercy High in Middletown. I had a picture of her between hockey stars Brian Leetch and Craig Janney as high school athletes of the year from the Gold Key Dinner. What a runner.
*The King and his Court came to Colchester for a special softball game. It's possible that was my first story in the Shopper.
*Coach Mark Brookes' outstanding, fundamentally-sound, baseball teams at Haddam-Killingworth.
*I did a review of one season in the Shopper by using Chris Berman nicknames. I don't know if it worked for readers, but I had a blast with it. My best two were Hale-Ray athlete John Leavitt "to Beaver" and East Hampton coach Joe "Put Your Money Down" Gambolati.
*Having all the athletes from six schools show up together for a picture when I selected an All-Regional Shopper soccer team.
*Hal got the staff into ESPN for the first days of the NCAA basketball tournament. We could watch all the games on the TVs in one room with endless amounts of food and drink (beer).
*The K Line. Barbara Kromish ran a football pool each week (college and pro games), which leaked through the Shoreline chain. It made the weekend more fun in the fall and early winter.
There were so many more. But perhaps the best days were just going down to Guilford each week and putting together the pages. I often went out with the staff afterward on Fridays. Gary Samek did the neighboring sports pages in Ledyard, Montville and Mystic the first year. Later, Don Thompson took over and became a lifelong friend.
Hal was great to me. He could be irritable at times, but was always helpful in the end. He gave me the platform and freedom to grow. I remember Hal got mad at me for not telling him I was doing an All-Regional Shopper soccer team. But at the end of his tirade he said something like "you did a good job with it."
Two things I unfortunately remember most about my weekly hour trips to Guilford were tragedies.
I had to drive off the highway for a few minutes when it came across the radio that Len Bias had died. The Challenger exploded just minutes before I arrived at the front desk in Guilford in early 1986.
Awful memories.
However, I have 10 years worth of wonderful memories from 24 months with Shoreline Newspapers. I will never forget the good times and the great people. It was a strong foundation for times to come.
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