Congratulations to all who were recognized. Here’s your handy link to APSE.

The round-up of what publications and individuals stood out.

The guy who started in the mailroom at ESPN and used to drive around Dick Vitale is in line for a big honor.

The official announcement:

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The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) today announced that George Bodenheimer, former ESPN Executive Chairman, and President, will be honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Sports at the 36th annual Sports Emmy® Awards ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Tuesday, May 5th, 2015.

“The National Academy is awarding this year’s Sports Lifetime Achievement Award to an individual who helped change the landscape of sports broadcasting globally,” said Bob Mauro, President, NATAS. “Working his way up from the mailroom, George Bodenheimer became its longest-tenured President while leading ESPN to an unprecedented period of global growth. His guiding hand in a multiplicity of new networks and platforms has made ESPN synonymous with sports content‘anytime and anywhere.’ The National Academy is delighted to bestow this well-deserved honor to him.”

George Bodenheimer graduated Denison University in 1980 with a degree in Economics. In 1981 he joined the fledgling ESPN as a driver in the mailroom and rose to become a cable industry pioneer and the company’s fifth and longest-tenured President (13 years-1998-2011). Consistent and substantive growth defined Bodenheimer’s tenure as President, leading to unprecedented success. His leadership style was simple but effective: empower all employees to proactively take charge of their careers and to base decisions on the company’s stated mission: “Serve Sports Fans. Anytime. Anywhere.”

During Bodenheimer’s time as President, ESPN grew to:

Eight domestic television networks, up from four.

Nearly 100 million households for ESPN and ESPN2, from 75 and 62 million, respectively.

48 international television networks, from 20.

18 web sites, from one .

7,000 employees worldwide, from 1900.

With Radio Shack going into bankruptcy, Patrick Reusse of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune recalls a time when their computers were the lifeblood for traveling sportswriters.

Reusse writes:

Radio Shack gave it up this week as a corporate entity and declared bankruptcy. A share of its stores will be rescued and operate in some form, but the way I see it, sportswriters who were traveling from the mid-‘80s to the arrival of the Internet age in the mid-‘90s have lost an old friend.

The fact that it’s an old friend – not a place visited regularly in the past 20 years – is a good reason that Radio Shack has gone into bankruptcy, of course.

Yes, it is hard to imagine we used to write and send stories on those computers. The sportswriter equivalent of walking five miles to school in three feet of snow, with no shoes.

The Silent Writer was an awful thing for a sportswriter on deadline, for several reasons:

One, there was a laborious correction process that required you to go to the empty space above a line of type, and go backwards to make a correction and then retype the entire line.

Two, there was a set of couplers, sort of a rubber brassiere, attached to the top of the machine. The connection between the couplers and the telephone was iffy, often causing repeated attempts to send copy to the main computer in the office.

Three, it needed electricity. There was always a scramble to secure an outlet in the press box. I was covering my first World Series in Yankee Stadium in 1981. Somehow, I managed to get my TI plugged into an outlet that had a connection with the scoreboard. When a new message was put up on the scoreboard, my computer would start spewing out letters aimlessly, and then I’d have to go through the correction process.

And Reusse concludes:

I had three or four Models 200s in my basement for a few years. Occasionally, when my laptop was balking, I would break one out and take it on a road trip.

The Tandy Radio Shack-80 Model 200 was the greatest machine in the history of the press box. I weep for all those Radio Shack outlets that were such friends to sportswriters, where you could get AA batteries in bulk at a good price and new cables when you accidentally left the last set in a press box in Atlanta.

Thank you, Radio Shack.

If you are interested in the craft, take a few minutes to read Wright Thompson’s first-person piece on his career. The ESPN The Magazine reporter is the latest subject of the “Still No Cheering in the Press Box” series by the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Maryland.

Plenty of valuable lesson, insights and just plain good stories from one of the best. And if you think you can’t get to the top without knowing everything in sports, guess again.

Thompson writes:

I was a sports fan. I mean, I was a normal sports fan. I liked a lot of teams, but I’m still not a huge sports fan. I can’t name all the Major League Baseball teams. I don’t know a ton about it.

I have an extraordinary amount of freedom and I work with really smart people. So I don’t-I feel no urge to go anywhere else. I don’t feel stifled by sports. I don’t feel like there’s a ton of stories that I’d like to tell that I don’t have the opportunity to tell. I just never felt restrained or stifled at all. I love these stories that we’re doing. There’s nowhere else I would ever want to go do it.

I get very selfish at times. I write about things that are interesting to me. Which are often very different. All of these stories, the thing they have in common is that they were somehow interesting. I feel like they’re all dispatches from a worldview.

Not to sort of cop out about it, but I don’t know how other people see stuff. I feel like most of sports writing is just sort of confirmation of a narrative. I feel like most of it is just the narrative. I don’t like that.

When you talk to someone who really knows about football, you realize that almost no one that covers football really understands what’s happening on the field. Every time you read a book, it’s behind the scenes. I recently read a book by a friend of mine, Nick Dawidoff, called Collision Low Crossers. Basically for a year and a half inside the NFL, he was just totally embedded with the Jets. If you read the coverage of that team, and then that read that book, it’s like the thing being covered is totally separate from the thing happening. You always want to write what’s really happening. Not sort of what it looks like from the outside.

And his process:

Every single movie ever it’s the character confronts an obstacle and is changed by it. That’s it. That’s what all stories are.

Whether it’s ‘The Iliad’ or ‘Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.’ It’s all the same. It’s understanding that and understanding conflict and resolution. There’s a great book called Writing for Story.You know, John Franklin. I’m sorry if he’s like you’re friend, he comes across like a pompous ass in this book but it’s a great book.

It really is. I think he thinks it’s a religion, when it isn’t. But it’s the best thing on outlining I’ve ever read. That book changed my work life. It’s the first time it ever really made sense to me.

Now I go through notes, I outline and underline and I make note cards and reorganize the notes into like piles. And I cover walls of offices with post-it notes. I do whatever feels like is necessary to wrangle all of this information.

I’m outlining on the road during stories. I’m outlining constantly. Trying to figure what is the story, what is the story. That’s what I’m asking myself over, over and over again on the road. What’s the story? What’s the conflict? What’s the resolution? What’s the arc? What’s the narrative arc? What question are you going to ask at the beginning that you answer at the end. What’s the end? I like ends, I like hammers. I want the ending that kind of makes you sort of feel hollow briefly in your gut.

That’s a very difficult thing. What is it? Once you have the end, how do you structure the story so as to maximize its power? And do nothing over the course of the story that might diminish it. Protect the hammer. It’s a rare and beautiful thing. How do you protect it while you’re telling the rest of the story? I don’t know. I’m constantly thinking about that.

That’s the job. Words are just words. You know, people just write how they write. Outlining is the thing. Not everyone writes down an outline. My friend, Chris Jones, just writes. But he’s outlining in his head. So it’s the process of thinking about the story. So you know what it is and where it’s going.

The hammer. I wrote this profile on Michael Jordan. I knew the moment the thing with the Western happened at the end. I found out earlier that he falls asleep to Westerns, and the moment I heard that I was like that’s the end of the story.

Everything else about that became about making sure that was in no way blunted. That had maximum power. I wanted to introduce the idea of Westerns, I wanted to do it in a way that was funny, so that you set it up funny, so it wasn’t just foreshadowing, so it was there and then you have to come back to it later and repurpose it for your main point of the whole thing. It was the perfect metaphor. I didn’t want to do anything that blunted its power.

I must’ve rewritten that thing 30 times. It was all about protecting the hammer. And you’ve got to know you’re ending when you see it. It should almost always be an action that speaks to the metaphoric heart of the story. You start to figure it out.

Steve Sabol may have taken NFL Films to another level with his cinematic flair, but it was his father Ed Sabol who had the original vision.

Tributes are pouring in today for the elder Sabol, who passed away yesterday at the age of 98. Just imagine what football would be like without NFL Films.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of Sabol’s story is that he had no professional film experience when he launched NFL Films in 1962. From Mike Kupper’s story in the Los Angeles Times:

An amateur cinematographer and former actor who longed to escape his job as a sales representative for his father-in-law’s menswear factory in Philadelphia, a 45-year-old Sabol took a bold gamble. He contacted NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, offering to double the previous bid of $1,500 for the rights to film the 1962 championship game, which turned out to be between Allie Sherman’s New York Giants and Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers in Yankee Stadium.

Rozelle went for the deal and Sabol, whose previous experience consisted of making home movies of his family — son Steve playing peewee and high school football was a frequent star — suddenly had to come up with a production company. Sabol called Steve home from Colorado College and father and son quickly formed Blair Motion Pictures, named after Sabol’s daughter, and hired a film crew.

The gamble paid off for all involved. In 2011, Sabol was enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The honor was long overdue and why his son, Steve, isn’t in Canton with him is inexplicable. Steve, though, couldn’t have been prouder for his father.  He summed up the essence of Ed Sabol.

“My dad has a great expression,” Steve Sabol said when his father’s 2011 Hall of Fame induction was announced. “Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever. And now my Dad’s story will be in Canton and hopefully that will live forever, too.”

Very strong “MLB Network Presents” tonight.

MLB Network Presents will premiere its final installment of the offseason onTuesday, February 10 at 9:00 p.m. ET with The Story of Billy Bean, a one-hour documentary hosted by Bob Costas about former outfielder Billy Bean’s experience as one of just two Major League Baseball players – current or former – to publicly come out as gay. Narrated by Bean himself, the program details his decision to leave baseball in 1996 at age 30 following the death of his partner, a relationship that he’d kept secret from his family and teammates, and his return to the game 18 years later as MLB’s first Ambassador for Inclusion.

Bean tells his story along with his parents Ed and Linda Kovac, family members, and former teammates and coaches, including Detroit Tigers manager Brad Ausmus and former MLB player and coach Tim Flannery. The Story of Billy Bean covers Bean’s childhood as the son of a former military officer to his time in the Major Leagues, where he lived “a double life” throughout his playing career, and touches on the reaction to his public coming out in 1999. MLB umpire Dale Scott and former NBA player Jason Collins discuss their friendships with Bean and the impact he had on their decisions to come out. A preview clip of this program can be viewed here.

In one segment, Bean speaks in-depth about being sent down to the Minor Leagues on the same day his partner died in 1995, only to find solace in Flannery, his Triple-A manager, despite Bean keeping his personal life a secret. Later in the show, Bean describes how a meeting with his father and openly gay former Marine staff sergeant and Purple Heart recipient Eric Alva helped strengthen Bean’s relationship with his dad, also a former Marine.

Bean was a Major Leaguer for parts of six seasons, playing from 1987-1989 and 1993-1995.  He made his debut with the Detroit Tigers (1987-89), followed by stints with the Los Angeles Dodgers (1989) and the San Diego Padres (1993-95).

These front pages say it all about Dean Smith’s impact in North Carolina.