2 minute read
Publisher column: An act of kindness goes a long way
from August 2024
by Johnston Now
By Randy Capps
Things were different in 1993. I was still a few months away from using the Internet for the first time, and on the night when I embarked on my first reporting assignment, I did so with two pens and a regular notebook.
I was a senior, covering my high school football team for a paper that no longer exists. I haven’t read that story in years, since it would take a trip to the Marion Public Library to do so, but I’m sure it’s awful.
That night wasn’t about award-winning prose. I was years away from making any of that. It was about building confidence, and deciding that a pen, some paper and a working knowledge of sports might be enough to make a career for me.
An unlikely figure helped speed that process up a bit. Bob Rankin was already a coaching legend at that point. He would go on to win 313 games in a Hall of Fame career, and to say that he was intimidating would be an understatement.
I was expecting the worst as I walked on the field at the end of the game. Marion won, so at least my first-ever interview would be with a winning coach, rather than a losing one. He never taught me, but he recognized my face.
“Are you a reporter now,” he asked, with an often-imitated, but never quite duplicated, drawl. “Yes sir,” is what I said in reply, with all the self confidence I could summon.
“OK then,” he said, and answered my questions like I had 30 years of experience.
Coach Rankin and I had many more interviews. While I was still at Marion High, and then after, when I was the sports editor of that same paper after college.
He’d often call me back to mention one more kid who had worked hard, just trying to get his name in the paper.
I often wonder if my own name would have appeared in them as often, if a football coach hadn’t been so accepting of a clueless young reporter all those years ago.