A North Carolina Great

Remembering Ronald Green, special man and sportswriter

The first time I got to cover a North Carolina football game in Kenan Stadium for The Daily Tar Heel, in the late 1970s, it was thrilling to be in a press box with folks whose bylines were familiar, grown-ups already doing for a living what I one day hoped to do.

Ronald Green of The Charlotte News was the sportswriter I wanted to see the most.

He was one of my targets a couple of times each week in the university library’s periodicals room, which offered newspapers from around the country. It was a journalism junkie’s dream. I’d read papers from the Los Angeles, Washington, Atlanta, hoping to absorb the work of the best at their craft. Charlotte’s afternoon paper—the longtime home for Green’s work—was essential reading too for someone trying to figure out how to chronicle sports and the people who play them, especially for someone from North Carolina.

One of legendary journalists of the Old North State, Green died Wednesday at age 95. His was a long life, well lived. That he is a member of the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the United States Basketball Writers Hall of Fame and the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame, along with having received lifetime honors from the PGA of America and the Memorial Tournament, speaks to his contributions over decades as Charlotte’s best sportswriter.

As his son Ron Green Jr., who followed in his father’s footsteps as excellent, award-winning writer who gets to the heart of the matter in his columns, noted in a Facebook post, “He wrote about games and people both big and small, bringing them to life. Whether it was Dean Smith and Arnold Palmer or no-name short-track race car drivers, Green had a gift for sharing their stories.”

Green, known as “Senior” to his many friends after his son got into the business, was an avid and low-handicap golfer much of his life, that passion and skill informing his columns. He loved the game, when he was in his mid-60s referring to himself “an old golf worshiper who gets sentimental at the sight of a flagstick.”

For all the Super Bowls and the Final Fours, the ACC Tournaments and Olympic Games that Green covered with insight and humanity, some of his best work was about golf.

Of Billy Joe Patton, the North Carolina amateur who nearly won the 1954 Masters over Sam Snead and Ben Hogan: “his follow through is like that of a man who swung at a knuckleball and missed.”

He noted the energetic Joe Inman Jr. of Greensboro “talks like the minute waltz.”

On Augusta National, where he covered 60 consecutive Masters, “the grass is as green as new money.”

Reflecting on Arnold Palmer’s first trip to play in the Open Championship, at St. Andrews in 1960, he wrote that Palmer “knocked the crust off of golf in the kingdom with his slashing style of play …”

Bob Gillespie, the former longtime sportswriter at The State newspaper in South Carolina, said in a social media post: “Senior was one of a kind. Talented writer, thoughtful mentor to young writers, and a great and brilliant friend to everybody lucky enough to know him.”

As Gary Schwab, the former executive sports editor of The Charlotte Observer, where Green wrote after many years at the News, noted on Facebook this week that the care Green put into his columns was evident in how he fretted hours before a game. “Then, time after time, sometimes with deadlines minutes away,” Schwab said, “he wrote paragraphs that couldn’t be improved if you had weeks to rewrite them.”

“I loved newspapers,” said Green, in a recollection shared by his son. “I still remember the first day I walked into a newspaper office—how it smelled. The ink and the paper. Still remember it. Never got over it. I loved being a newspaperman. I loved the rush, and the crush, of a deadline. And I just never got over feeling good when I saw my byline in the paper.”

For Green’s many readers over many years, just seeing his byline was the good news.