By Mark Pukalo
The summer of 1987 was my last with Shoreline Newspapers. It was time to move on, take a chance at the big time.
The opportunity arose to settle in for a 30-hour position covering high school sports for the Hartford Courant, the oldest continually-published newspaper in the country. The whole thing happened so fast.
It was a bit intimidating, but I had to learn to write on deadline and challenge myself to get better. High School editor Bohdan Kolinsky was my best mentor and a good friend. Bo was the dean of high school sports in the state and his calm hand helped me through the many difficult obstacles I would face.
My first story in the Courant was probably a high school football game. However, most of my time was spent in the office answering phones, taking box score information and writing roundups.
Most of my memories from those first few years were from the basketball court.
*Tracy Lis, the amazing scorer leading Killingly to a state girls basketball title. Lis went on to score a bundle of points at Providence College.
*Southington's girls basketball team coached by Joe Daddio, who later went through some scandals. Meghan McNicholas was his feisty point guard and she is currently a volunteer assistant for the Blue Knights with a daughter on the team.
*I covered big Marvin Saddler with St. Joseph-Trumbull one night in a great game at South Catholic in Hartford. St. Joe's coach Vito Montelli (878 wins) was a classic. It was like being led to the governor or a Pope when you went to interview him after a game. Saddler went on to have a solid career at Providence. Montelli passed away in 2023 at 92.
*The most amazing individual performance I ever saw while with the Courant was "Super" John Williamson's son Maurice playing in the state tournament with Wilbur Cross one night in Meriden. Jiggy was unstoppable. A few of his 20-foot jumpers seemed to go through the net without it moving. Boom. Williamson went on to LSU to play for Dale Brown. Teammate Ricky Lopes, an uncoordinated 7-2 center, went on to play at Duquesne.
The thing about that night? I will always remember how amazing Williamson was, but Bulkeley beat Cross. Jonathan Greenfield led the way for the Bulldogs.
*I can never forget Mike Williams from Weaver. He was a fun player to watch on the green court. Mike looked slow, but had a great first step and lots of tricks. He went on to make some big shots for John Calipari at UMass. I don't remember it, but he apparently made the key basket the night Temple's John Chaney stormed into the press conference looking to beat up Calipari. Williams stepped in between. Mike passed away in 2021. R.I.P.
*One event I covered early in my career sticks with me. The national wheelchair basketball championships were at Central Connecticut somewhere between 1987-89. The athletes were great and it was an eye-opening event to see.
Probably the most memorable story I ever wrote was my first-person account trying out for the semi-professional New Haven Skyhawks basketball team in May of 1988. It was a great experience and I appreciated the confidence the editors had in me as a "part-timer." My lead?
"On a dark and gloomy Saturday morning, 28 basketball players climb the steps of the New Haven YMCA building with a dream."
I covered some UConn soccer games and pitched a story on NFL football in 1988, because I was going out to the Cleveland area to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins in August. They lived close to Browns camp and I was awarded a press pass through the New York Giants. Someone in my family knew someone who knew Browns coach Marty Schottenheimer's wife I think. LOL. Being as naive as I was at the time in these surroundings, I wandered into his office and got a brief one-on-one interview with Marty. I remember him being very nice about it. I'd probably be tackled and arrested if I did that today.
I was writing a story about Browns future Hall of Fame tight end Ozzie Newsome. I got a few quotes from Ozzie in the locker room and went to work, putting together what I thought was a pretty darn good piece for my experience. I also wrote a story on the Giants-Browns preseason game.
It was a surreal experience for me in the big time. There were a lot of positives, but one big negative. Jim Jenks, a recently-hired origination editor somehow didn't go for a pretty simple lead and intro to a basic feature. He fooled with the first few graphs and Ozzie Newsome became Ozzie "Smith" in the lead. Somehow, no one on the copy desk or the floor caught the stupid mistake. Can you tell I'm still pissed about it almost 37 years later?
Memories. Ugh.
I had one other standout experience before a major change at the Courant in the fall of 1989. Trumbull won the Little League World Series. I was sent to cover the parade when they got home in late August and the story was to be on A1, the cover of the whole newspaper.
Once again, I wish I had saved that page. I walked the parade route and talked to people, then the coach and players. Chris Drury, the current GM of the New York Rangers, was the key interview. Good thing no one changed his name to Chris "Smith."
The Best Team I Ever Played For
Everything changed in the summer of 1989.
I had my first A1 story and my professional basketball career was over, but the most important development was joining a Dream Team of writers/friends covering high school sports. The paper expanded and was ready to zone local sports and news. How things have changed. They have four sports writers on staff today.
Dom Amore, Paul Doyle, Viv Bernstein, Glenn Jordan, Lori Riley, Mark Pukalo, Roberto Gonzalez, Mike Downs and Dan Gerstein. Later, Cheryl Rosenberg, Desmond Conner and Kevin Lyons joined the group when others were promoted or left.
And don't forget Woj! Yes, Adrian Wojnarowski was a part-timer on this trail-blazing ship, captained by Bohdan.
One of my first "zone 4" stories was on former Bacon Academy star Ron Wotus, who was in the final season of his mostly-minor league baseball career. They called him gramps in the minor-league locker room that year. Wotus was later rumored to be in the hunt to become Tampa Bay Rays manager before Kevin Cash got hired.
We dove into high schools full force, changing roundups with every edition - 2GSocRound became 3GSocRound. GlennGame, LoriGame and MarkGame mostly ran in the third and fourth editions - which spanned from Suffield to Windham to East Hartford. Preview time became 12-hour days with a good portion of it spent on the phone trying to track down coaches.
At the time, I could not get enough of writing. Origination editor Len Lampugnale, who later went on the ESPN, once told me to go home and get some rest while I was banging out a feature on a cross country runner from zone 3 who was coming back from a skiing accident. He was right.
When the state tournaments and class meets arrived, the hardest and most entertaining part began. Initially, we had little radio shack computers where you could only see a few lines. I'm not sure how we did it at times, covering state wrestling and indoor track meets sitting at a small table or attaching the couplers on a pay phone to try and send a story. I think I would go nuts if I had to do that today. The pictures below are the second radio shacks we received. I still have mine as a souvenir from those days.
Everyone has their war stories of deadline work in odd places. We missed editions at times, but always found a way to get a phone line or talk a school administrator into letting us into the main office to send.
Glenn once wrote while sitting on a covered toilet in the press box at Southern Connecticut. I'm not sure how I got a story in once at Morgan High in Clinton after Tyson Wheeler and New London played a local team in the state basketball tournament. I think I somehow got it in on the fourth or fifth telephone I tried in the main office.
Perhaps my biggest nightmare was later on in 1995-96 when I was covering a Whalers game in Toronto for the first time. No one told me that there was something different about sending from Canada. I had to talk an operator into connecting me to the slot on our copy desk. She probably broke rules to do it for me. Thank God it was hockey, eh? To make things worse that night, I got lost getting back up to the press box at the old Maple Leaf Gardens after the game. Again, somehow, the work got done.
For almost 20 years, I covered high school sports for the Courant. There were plenty of athletes, teams, games that I will remember forever.
* Coach Joe Erardi's Manchester girls soccer team in 1990. What an amazing group to watch, filled with toughness, diversity, grace and intelligence. They tied Wilton 2-2 in an epic state championship game. Central defender Jennifer Brindisi was a strong player, a great interview and had maturity beyond her years. Of course, she later became a high school coach.
*Those NCCC boys basketball coaches, especially Danny Sullivan and the unforgettable George Melnick. Sullivan is a legend at Windsor Locks and Melnick was one of a kind. I did a feature on him and the headline was "I Just Do Crazy Things."
*I covered Dwight Freeney with Bloomfield in a game at Simsbury one sunny Saturday. I remember saying he was the biggest human being I had ever seen, an absolute monster. But he ended up being considered smallish in his Hall of Fame NFL career.
*The Rockville football team, coached by Tom Dunn, was pummeled by West Haven in the 1989 state championship and made it back the next season against Newington. Rams quarterback Steve Mikulski took the team down the field in the waning moments to win 14-12. Mikulski was like Elway against the Browns, systematically taking apart the Newington defense. So I said in my lead that Rockville fans will forever just call it "The Drive."
*Me, Lori Riley, Journal Inquirer legend Matt Buckler and others had some memorable and busy days at the state cross country championships in East Hartford's Wickham Park. What a venue. Looking back at the winners on the CIAC site, only one name stands out - Waterford's Liz Mueller. She won four straight State Opens.
*I like to think I discovered a great little basketball player at distant New Fairfield High named Jennifer Rizzotti, who later won a state championship. The rest is history in Connecticut basketball.
Rizzotti was special. But to be perfectly honest, the best girls high school basketball player I ever saw in Connecticut - even better than Nykesha Sales and Lis - was Nadine Domond at Bridgeport Central. Her athleticism was off the charts. One of the most memorable games I ever covered was when Central came to West Hartford to play Northwest Catholic. Domond and NW Catholic's Sarah Gaspar went back and forth making big shots and Central got beat. I'm not sure what their numbers were, but it seemed like both scored in the 30s. What a night. Gaspar ended up at Georgia Tech. Domond played at Iowa and briefly in the WNBA. Nadine's Wikipedia page says after her career she organized events to feed the homeless and now she is a head coach at Virginia State. I knew there was something special about her.
*I saw Kevin Zahner hit several bombs with Ellington baseball. He later spent five years in the minors with the Dodgers.
*Jon Veneziano of Berlin golf won two state championships and later made an improbable run the United States Junior at Yale. More on his epic match with Richard Breed at the CT State Junior in another blog.
*Matt Doyle of Simsbury won a state golf title for Ed Lynch, who became a friend. Lynch was a basketball official who coached the Trojans to state titles in boys soccer and golf. Unfortunately, he would have had another state golf title at Simsbury Farms if one of his top players had not signed an incorrect scorecard. The kid keeping the Simsbury player's card recorded the wrong score on a hole. (Garrett Post?) signed it without thoroughly checking it. To this day, I think the kid from the other down-state team did it on purpose
*I saw Scott Burrell play quarterback for Hamden at Fitch High before he played minor league baseball, threw the historic "Late, Great" pass to Tate George for UConn and teamed with Michael Jordan and the world champion Chicago Bulls. Dream team member Glenn Jordan came up with the headline "It's Late, It's Tate, It's Great" that night. I was in the Melbourne, Fla. area with Dan Gerstein and old friend Bill Calhoun at a bar called DJ Bombers.
*Trumbull's amazing girls soccer team won 49 straight games for coach Abe Breslow. They might have been the best team in state history and Breslow could not have been a nicer guy. Abe's son Craig pitched in the majors and is now an executive with the Red Sox.
*I think I might have covered future Hall of Fame goalie Jonathan Quick playing his first high school hockey game for Hamden High. He later played at Avon Old Farms before UMass and a long NHL career that has included three Stanley Cups. The day he was drafted by the LA Kings, I called him for a quote. It took Jon a while to get to the phone. He was playing whiffle-ball Home Run Derby in the neighborhood. Cool customer.
*One of my favorite athletes of all time was Emily Stauffer from New Canaan. She was a smart, tough and skillful center midfielder. But I found out that she was a much better person than a player. A feature on her covered the All-State issue one year. I later heard about her taking a year off at Harvard to donate bone marrow for her brother Matt, who had Leukemia. I went to Cambridge with Jeff Jacobs so he could do a column on it because I thought that was a better vehicle for the story. Jeff wrote a fantastic column. I made the right call.
*One my other favorites was a young woman from Staples-Westport named Karem Esteva. She was a soccer All-Stater, but Esteva also helped the basketball team to a state title in 1995. I remember interviewing her after that title game and she had a smile that could like up Hartford. Esteva went on to play soccer at Virginia and for the Philippines in the Asian Cup.
*I always loved going down state for Saturday high school hockey games and built relationships with the coaches, especially Bill Gerosa at Notre Dame-West Haven. Marty Roos of Notre Dame-Fairfield, Bo Hickey of New Canaan and Matt Sather at Fairfield Prep. The 1999 Division I championship game went five OTs with ND-Fairfield beating New Canaan 3-2. I did see Max Pacioretty play for New Canaan before he went to prep school and the NHL.
*I spent a lot of afternoons just down the street from the office covering coach Steve Kassoy's Hartford Public boys soccer team. He had a rainbow coalition for a team and was forced to deal with a lot of egos, but they played entertaining soccer and big Al Granger was a fun player to watch. They lost to Danbury in the 1990 state finals and dropped a tough penalty-kick tiebreaker at Manchester High in the playoffs another year.
*The most memorable hockey championship day was when Nick Bonino led Farmington to the Div. II title and Mark Arcobello led Fairfield Prep to the Div. 1 title in 2005 at Yale's Ingalls Rink. Both later played in the NHL. I decided to give Arcobello the player of the year and wrote a feature on Bonino for the All-State issue. Bonino was a skinny, small kid the first time I saw him play. The next year he had gotten what seemed like 8 inches taller, but he was gangly and plodding. It didn't matter, He scored 68 goals in 24 games. Bonino went on to Avon Old Farms and within a month into his first season he was skating much better (plyometrics helped as I remember) and his amazing talent poured out. I remember asking Old Farms coach John Gardner if he could be successful at the next levels. Gardner answered by just moving his hands. Bonino had NHL hands. He played 868 NHL games and posted 358 points with two Stanley Cups. Gardner was as honest and sharp as they come.
*One player I followed throughout his career was Somers basketball star Sean Tabb. The kid was so skinny, but man he could shoot and he was such a smart player. Tabb ended up playing for the University of Hartford.
*Speaking of big fish in a small pond, I wrote a story about two Class S guards who could play in college - Coventry's Jack Ayer and Derrik Jerman of Bacon. Jerman played at Stonehill and Ayer at Hartford. I called Jim Calhoun for the story and he gave me a quote. Ayer was an amazing high school player. If I remember right, his team outdueled Vin Baker and Old Saybrook in a big state tournament game. I saw where Ayer recently died. What a player he was. Think Rex Chapman, without the major hops.
*I witnessed Simsbury hockey coach Tom Cross' son start his high school career on the ice. Tommy Cross later played at Boston College before being drafted by the Boston Bruins, where he played three regular-season games and one in the playoffs. He had an assist in the playoff game.
*Glastonbury boys soccer. Erik Barbieri, Max Zieky, Chris Wright, AJ, Dirt Landers, Ken Mehler, Bob Landers. The girls were fun to cover as well.
*I went down to Newtown High a few times to see a top-ranked boys soccer team and later picked Marcus Tracy as the state player of the year. He played for Wake Forest. Several years later I was living in Florida when the horror in Sandy Hook happened. That day was my first copy-editing shift for Sportsdirectinc. I had 10 college basketball previews to edit and I could not concentrate with what was going on in the background on TV. Later, they showed the soccer field where all the press was stationed. It was surreal. I knew that place. It was a place for fun, not sorrow.
I could go on and on. Coach John Blomstrann's great E.O. Smith boys soccer teams, the Avon girls soccer champions, the frigid Hall-Conard football game I covered, Claudia Lombard of Guilford soccer and Chris Sawyer of East Hartford baseball. I vaguely remember possibly covering Aaron Hernandez playing basketball for Bristol Central.
My dance card began to expand as time went on, but I covered high schools until I left the paper in 2007. The lack of understanding from parents, the grind of the job and the change in form newspapers took made is more difficult and less fun.
But I will always have the memories of the camaraderie with the Dream Team. We worked so hard and we had so much fun. I can't say enough about that group. I miss those days in and out of the office. There was basketball at the Y, afternoons on the golf course and on the ski slopes. Those late-night (and after-hour) trips to Kenneys with Owen Canfield. Bob Clancy and many others while getting served beers, burgers and fries by the legendary Gemma. The time of my life.
I worked with Connecticut sports writing legends like Woody Anderson, Tom Yantz, Tommy Hine, Terry Price, Greg Garber, Jack O'Connell, Michael Arace, Alan Greenberg, Claire Smith, Jacobs, Bo, Owen and many others. I had great copy editors as well, led by Clance, Lenny, Liz Gramling, Sue Banning, Pat Dunne, Jay Spiegel and Jennifer Overman to name just a few.
We lost Bohdan in 2003 suddenly. No one will ever forget him. That smirking smile, that big winter coat, that slow, looping golf swing, but most of all the way he cared about our group. He was like our second father.
Dom and Lori are still at the Courant and have won well-deserved Connecticut Sportswriter of the Year awards. Paul went on to cover the Red Sox and Cheryl moved to California where she covered the Angels. Viv covered the Whalers and later the Red Wings in Detroit. Glenn moved on to the Portland, Maine paper and is apparently a pickleball superstar. Dan went on to run a Presidential campaign (Joe Lieberman) among many political endeavors, Michael became a professor and has written books, Roberto went on to teach, Desmond covered UConn football and basketball and Kevin is in Texas where he has covered the Cowboys.
Woj, well you know about him.
We were the "Dream Team," in Hartford Courant sports department history. No one can take it away from us.
The first 10 years or so were amazing. It got more difficult after that, but I was able to do some exciting things in some unforgettable places. I still have many more stories to tell in the next six chapters.
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