The Spire

Dan Shaughnessy ‘75

Former Chief Sports Editor

My first semester at Holy Cross was in September of 1971.

It might as well have been a million years ago.

It was a world totally foreign to the Holy Cross of today. We were the last all-male freshman class, there was a bar in the basement of just about every dorm, and first floor classrooms in Carlin, Alumni, Bevin and Wheeler allowed us to sometimes fall out of bed and stumble to class barefoot. Busloads of young women from Emmanuel, Regis, and Newton College of the Sacred Heart occasionally visited Hogan for Friday night “mixers”.

There was no on-campus sports arena for basketball and hockey. Fr. Francis J. Hart (S. J.) — not yet a building — was the genial campus director of intramurals, already 40 years into his position and probably the most beloved person on campus.

I was assigned mailbox 1902 in the Hogan post office and the editorial staff at The Crusader (now The Spire) stuffed a flyer into the box of all freshmen who’d done any high school newspapering. It was a recruiting pitch to see if you’d be interested in coming to the paper’s first meeting of the new school year.

This was a welcome missive for a nervous freshman reluctant to engage in extracurricular activities. Reporting to the paper’s office on Hogan 5, I introduced myself to sports editor Jim Clarkin and — probably because hardly anyone else showed up for the meeting — he assigned me to cover the freshman football team. I had my first byline two weeks later: “Crusader Cubs Untested, Battle Indian Frosh Today.”

Just over a year later, Clarkin abdicated and I became sports editor of The Crusader.

It was a job that demanded a lot of time and it brought life-changing clarity. At the age of 19, I knew I wanted a career in sports journalism. And because I was a student at Holy Cross, I was able to make it happen.

HC was the perfect place to learn and practice the craft. The Cross was still playing Division I football and Boston newspapers and television stations occasionally covered our games. When the vaunted Boston Globe didn’t drive west to cover action at Fitton Field or the Worcester Auditorium, New England’s biggest news source would sometimes let The Crusader‘s sports editor file a story. My first Globe byline was a piece on HC wide receiver Mark Sheridan before we played Dartmouth in October of 1973 (Sheridan was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in ’74).

Holy Cross in the 70s didn’t have journalism courses, but it had brilliant instructors who challenged us to think independently and defend our position on any topic.

Father John Brooks (S.J.), President of the College, was a huge sports fan and invited me to sit in his office every couple of weeks to talk about the state of Holy Cross athletics and the world of sports journalism. Fr. Brooks had attended HC with New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson (’51) who would win the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1981. Fr. Brooks encouraged me to read Anderson, Red Smith and Arthur Daly.

Boston television commentator/reporter Clark Booth (’61) was the Hub sports media’s top wordsmith and had time for me when he’d visit campus to do a story for WCVB-TV. It turned out that my dorm room in Hanselman was the same room Booth occupied 15 years earlier. That seemed like a good omen.

As a senior, I was allowed to create my own (full credit) one-on-one sportswriting class under the tutelage of Fr. William Healy (S.J.), who had been President of the College in the 1940s. He stressed lots of re-write, and active voice over passive voice. Important lessons.

Fr. Healy ideas for my required reading and started me off with “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” — John Updike’s masterful New Yorker essay on Ted Williams final big league at bat.

Decades later, I got to know Ted Williams and he wrote the forward for one of my books. In 2010, one year after Updike died and eight years after Ted passed, a publisher asked me to submit a blurb for a small book devoted to Updike’s classic story.

Easiest assignment ever.

“The greatest writer, in the greatest ballpark, on the greatest hitter who ever lived.”

Consider me eternally blessed and grateful.

Holy Cross’s Class of ’75 celebrates its 50th reunion in June. The Tomahawk/Crusader/Spire this year celebrates its 100th. Nice symmetry there.

Thank you, Holy Cross. You were the perfect landing spot for this 18 year-old kid all those years ago.

(Dan Shaughnessy, ’75, worked at the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Washington Star after graduation and has been at the Boston Globe full time since 1981, a sports columnist since 1989. He has written 13 books and in 2016 received the Baseball Writers of America’s Career Excellence Award presented annually at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.)

Featured Image courtesy of College of the Holy Cross

Copy Edited by Caroline Kramer ’26