Goobye Bill Lyon
November 17th, 2005 by JoshVia Eagles Eye, comes the news that the venerated Philadelphia Inquirer sports reporter, Bill Lyon is retiring and will publish his last column this Sunday, November 19th. Says the Inky:
Bill Lyon has been at The Inquirer for more than 32 years, starting in the summer of 1972 as business editor. He became a sports columnist in 1973. He won the National Headliner Award in 1988, was nominated six times for the Pulitzer Prize and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. Lyon was selected seven times by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association as the Sportswriter of the Year for Pennsylvania.
Lyon hasn’t been writing regularly for a while now but his wise words will still be sorely missed from the sports page. He was definitely one of the first writers at the Inquirer who I would look for in the paper when I was a kid. Eagles Eye points out this telling quote from the day after the Sixers won their ‘83 championship — this town’s last — that may give some despondent Philly fans in midnight green a reason to hope, or at least call WIP:
But what Malone brought to the Sixers was a new attitude, best explained by Pat Riley, who watched his defending champions brutalized in four straight.
“When you keep losing in the finals,” Riley said of the Sixers, “it takes a tremendous toll. You lose a little bit of your basketball life. They had a lot of guys who had tasted nothing but the pain, and that’s bad.
“Getting Moses was the best move they could have made. It rejuvenated them. You could look at them and see they were more committed.”
Let’s hope Andy, Joe, and Jeff are reading this. Good luck Bill.
