Readers of my blog will certainly be sad to hear the news that Houston Chronicle sports media reporter David Barron is retiring from the paper after 1,500 or columns plus hundreds of more news stories.
"I know that I'm going to miss the deadline rush," Barron told mikemcguff.com. "I have such fond memories of scrambling to get things done on short notice under what at the time seemed to be immense pressure. After writing those stories, I would wander around the press box or the house almost as if I were in a daze, trying to calm down and get a grip."
This means my coverage of the Houston sports media is going to be even worse. Basically, outside of a few press releases the sports radio stations send me, most of my coverage is basically "David Barron of the Houston Chronicle reports" posts.
After 31 years, Barron has decided to take the Hearst buyout of Houston Chronicle employees. We've already seen other Chronicle names like tech columnist Dwight Silverman and real estate reporter Nancy Sarnoff announce departures.
"I’ve been privileged to work with David for more than 30 years," Houston Chronicle Texans/NFL Writer John McClain told mikemcguff.com. "I’ve never known a more versatile, thorough, insightful and informative writer who can handle any topic at a moment’s notice. Losing David is like amputating an arm off our sports coverage. Nobody can do what he’s consistently done so well for so long with so much class. He’ll be missed by many."
"Through the years, including a time as an assistant sports editor, David wrote with empathy, honesty and perspective on anything from six-man football in small-towns of West Texas to Simone Biles and the Olympics in Rio," Houston Chronicle Sports Editor Reid Laymance added. "He is, indeed, a Texas treasure."
Not only did Barron report on the sports media, but he also covered the Olympics and had to be fast to make those college football story deadlines - yet another one of his many beats.
"One of the most memorable was the Texas-USC game for the 2005 BCS national championship," Barron recalled. "Deadline those days was 11 p.m., and the game ended at 11:18 p.m. I remember seeing a Texas player run on the field with his helmet off and thinking, 'You idiot, get off the field. You're going to get penalized' and then realizing that the game was over and Texas had won. I was so stunned that it took me a good 30 seconds before I could get back to my story. "
When Barron arrived at the Houston Chronicle in 1990, he probably had no idea what the fourth largest US city would experience sports-wise. From the highs of the Houston Rockets back-to-back NBA championship, to lows of the Houston Oilers' departure, the city's NFL return with the Houston Texans and the Houston Astros World Series win and subsequent fallout.
"Every writer who covers an elimination game call tell you stories about writing two leads - one in which the team loses, one in which it wins," Barron revealed. "Sometimes, you get to use both. I adapted some of my unused 'Astros lose' story from Game 7 of the 2017 World Series to use in the 'Astros lose' story that I wrote following Game 7 of the 2019 World Series."
While there was lots of Houston sports news to cover, the world of Houston sports TV and radio coverage was busy, too.
As Barron recently wrote, most of the longtime Houston TV sportscasters that were around for so many years are now off the air. Plus the Bayou City went from zero all-sports radio stations to four at one point!
"I also wrote about the growth of sports radio from one station to two to three and to four and the difficulty that the genre has had in establishing itself to the same degree, at least where ratings are concerned, that it has in other cities like Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Detroit," Barron said.
Then there was the CSN Houston saga.
"The Houston media story that will forever live with me was the collapse of Comcast SportsNet Houston," Barron said. "It was such a great product - the kind of channel that viewers deserved in Houston, which was one of the early strongholds of regional sports networks with the 1983 launch of Home Sports Entertainment. I knew when it was launched that there would be distribution issues, but they unfolded in a different manner than I expected. I was covering an Astros game in 2013 - Andy Pettitte's last game with the Yankees - when I got the call that the network was going into involuntary bankruptcy. That was a double deadline day.
"From there, I covered a lot of bankruptcy court hearings and learned a lot about bankruptcy law and also about the ability to use Twitter as a headline service while writing from the courtroom. A lot of the CSNH employees who lost their jobs told me they relied on me to learn about things that they weren't hearing from management, and that was a responsibility that I took to heart. It's been great so see so many of the CSNH people do so well in other markets but so disappointing that Houston no longer has a representative RSN for its teams and their fans."
Barron was there at every step.
"I think David deserves the highest compliment you can give a newspaper person: he was competent and dependable," former Houston Chronicle and now CultureMap columnist Ken Hoffman told me.
The Tyler native developed his reporting chops at the Tyler Morning Telegraph (1975-78), even before graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. From there, Barron moved to The Waco Tribune-Herald (1978-84) and the Dallas bureau of United Press International (1984-90), then to Houston.
"My family has lived in Texas since the 1850s, and I never aspired to work or live anywhere else," Barron told me. "I was able to start in my hometown of Tyler at age 19 after my sophomore year in college and again after graduation. I moved to Waco at a time where there were a lot of things going on involving the balance between free speech, institutional authority and religious dogma at Baylor University. That's where I met Dave Campbell, who gave me the opportunity to work for Texas Football. I always wanted to work for a wire service, and I got to do so at UPI in Dallas.
"I came to Houston at a really rough time in my life, and Houston gave me the chance to start over at the biggest paper in the state. The city and its people have been very kind to me. I am so grateful for the opportunity, and I continue to be amazed how welcoming Houston is to people who come here from around the world. There's so much of Houston that I haven't seen or enjoyed because I've focused so much on work, and I hope I can enjoy it, when circumstances allow, given that I will have more free time."
Barron has written for Dave Campbell's Texas Football since 1980, where he served as the high school editor and then the Managing Editor until 2004.
"I have a couple of book projects that may come to fruition this year, and I hope to continue writing for Texas Football and other publications as opportunities present themselves," Barron added. "I also want to devote more time to friends and family. I don't know that I'll be on this plane of existence when I'm 90, let alone writing as Dave Campbell continued to do into his mid-90s, but who knows? We'll see."
Now Barron hopes he can be happy writing 75 stories a year rather than the usual 275.
