Gold-Medal Reporting

Meet the LA grad telling Olympians’ stories

by Angela Stefano

The Olympic Games only take place every two years, but Philip Hersh ’64 made covering the global event a full-time job for nearly three decades. Seven years after attending his first Winter Olympics — the 1980 Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., for the Chicago Sun-Times — Phil became the Chicago Tribune’s Olympics beat reporter, a position he held from 1987 until his 2015 retirement from the paper. In that time, he wrote about plenty of household names, but particularly enjoyed spotlighting lesser-known athletes.

“The beauty of covering the Olympics is there are all of these weird sports, and the people in them have great stories,” Phil says. “I always felt motivated, and kind of morally obligated, to give these great athletes the same amount of coverage … In the case of Olympians, and particularly female Olympians, they were delighted to have someone care about them.”

In addition to 11 Winter Olympics and eight Summer Olympics, Phil has worked dozens of World Figure Skating Championships and U.S. Figure Skating Championships, 12 World Track and Field Championships, seven soccer World Cups, and two Pan-American Games. His career highlights also include covering the Super Bowl, World Series, Stanley Cup Playoffs, and NBA Playoffs, as well as the Preakness, NCAA Men’s and Women’s Final Four, and college football bowl games.

“I had a lot of money to do what I wanted to do for a long period of time,” Phil recalls, and his editors at the Tribune knew that sending him where the athletes were would help him form relationships that would pay off in scoops and unique stories. During the Olympics, American stars took precedence, but Phil also found time to tell the stories of, for example, a gymnast from Uzbekistan whose dying son survived because of connections she’d made in her sport and one of the last swimmers to train in East Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the country’s reunification. Phil’s work earned him four Pulitzer Prize nominations, among other honors.

“My basic philosophy … was to write good stories, no matter what country they were from,” Phil says. “I would seek out good stories, and if they were a story about a Russian, that’s great.”

Born in Boston and raised in Revere, Phil came to Lawrence Academy after looking for an alternative to Revere High School. He always loved sports and remembers writing fictional stories on a typewriter in his older brother’s room when he was a kid, but he says longtime French teacher Dick Gagné “actually motivated me to the idea of figuring out what makes a well-written sentence.” English teacher Bob Shepherd, meanwhile, had his classes memorize The Elements of Style and stressed the importance of “writing clear sentences that 18 people would read the same way.”

“The level of teaching was just very, very good. And also, the level of students was very, very good,” Phil reflects. “I learned a lot about writing from the way I was taught both French and English at Lawrence Academy.”

“The beauty of covering the Olympics is there are all of these weird sports, and the people in them have great stories.”

Phil with two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt of Germany in 2018

Phil graduated from Yale University in 1968 with a degree in early 19th-century French literature, having also pursued advanced studies in Spanish and Italian. He applied to and was accepted into law school at the University of Pennsylvania, but “hated it within minutes” and left, instead working in Yale’s Sports Information Office until he was drafted into the U.S. Army Reserve and began his year of basic training in late 1969.

Prior to working at the Tribune, Phil worked briefly at the Beverly Times, was a sports editor at the Gloucester Daily Times from 1970 until 1972, and then covered several sports at the Baltimore Evening Sun for four and a half years. In 1977, he began covering Major League Baseball for the Chicago Daily News; when the paper merged with the Sun Times, he worked there until he left for the Tribune in 1984. The 2022 Winter Olympics, held in February in Beijing, China, would have been Phil’s 20th in-person Olympics. Due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, he instead covered the event from his home in Evanston, Ill., where he lives with his wife of 46 years, Ann Roberts, a professor emeritus in art history at Lake Forest College.