Remembering Jim Donaldson: The end of an era in Providence sports journalism

There is never a good way to find out someone you know has died.

Such was the case Thursday afternoon when I was scrolling through social media. I kept scrolling down and down. Ho-hum. It was all the typical stuff on my timeline. There were reports about the Patriots maybe needing a new head coach. There was stuff about Elon Musk trying to take over the world. The stock market was down over 1000 points.

But then I saw a picture of Jim Donaldson. For a brief moment, I had forgotten he had retired from writing about sports for the Providence Journal a few years ago.

For a brief moment, I got a tinge of excitement that I used to get when I used to open up the sports section of the newspaper to find a new column written by either Donaldson or Bill Reynolds.

We were lucky in our little state of Rhode Island to have two legendary sports writers write for for our one local newspaper for over three decades. Donaldson and Reynolds stayed and watched while others – like Tom E. Curran or Sean McAdam – used the Providence Journal as a stepping stone to get to the larger, more prestigious Boston market.

There is no shame in that. People have their career ambitions and working in Rhode Island is not viewed as a dream, final destination kind of job. The Providence market has been used as a training ground for media members, not just sports journalists, to hone their skills and then move on – people like Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira, Dylan Dreyer, and Christiane Amanpour.

Reynolds and Donaldson could have very easily followed suit and gone to bigger markets. They were talented enough. But they didn't. They stayed for their entire careers. They were local kids who were plenty happy to work at the newspaper they had grown up with.

I could relate. I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a journalist. I had the image in my head of me wearing a fedora, a tie loosely knotted around my neck, a lit cigar hanging from the side of my mouth, pounding away at a typewriter in a smoke filled room.

Every day, when I was a kid, I would walk down to the corner of my street, walk down the main street a couple of blocks, and stop at the red box chained to a telephone poll. I would take out the quarter I had probably stolen from my mother's purse and put it in the slot. I'd hear the click of the door to the box unlock and I'd pull it open and be hit with the fresh smell of the fresh ink of the newspapers inside. It was heaven to me just looking at the neatly folded newspapers in the box.

The best days would be the ones when I'd walk up to the box and the person that was there before me didn't close the door properly and I'd save myself a quarter.

Jackpot! This is my lucky day!

I loved reading the paper. It made me feel like a grown up.

Over time I got to "know" the writers. I studied their style.

In fact, in recent years I started my own sports blog. One of the things I started doing this year was writing a weekly article picking NFL games. I, actually, modeled it after the way I remembered Jim Donaldson doing it in the 1980's. You pick the winner of each game and just give one witty, usually comical, sentence explaining why you picked the team. Donaldson wouldn't give any detailed analysis of home/road splits or other obscure metrics.

Sometime around 1990, Donaldson incorporated a contest with his weekly NFL picks column. The contest was called "Beat Jim Donaldson." On the same page as Donaldson's picks was a ballot with all the games and boxes next to each team. You'd check off the box of the team you thought was going to win and mail it in to the newspaper. If you picked more winners than Donaldson, you'd get your name in the paper and win some sort of a prize. I think it was a T-shirt with "I beat Jim Donaldson" on it.

I'd fill out that ballot sheet and mail it in every week. If there was a week when I'd forget to do it, I would get so mad. I can't remember if I ever won, but I remember the contest clear as day.

So when I saw Donaldson's familiar bearded face on my timeline this past Thursday, I was swept away in nostalgia for a moment.

But then it hit me, even before I read the caption, that Donaldson wasn't writing anymore. Why would a picture of him be on my timeline? The only reason it might be on my timeline is if...

Nooooooo!

We lost Bill Reynolds just sixteen months ago, and now Jim Donaldson. That same year we lost Art Martone, who was a longtime Red Sox beat writer for the Journal. So within the span of less than two years, the three major sports writers who that little kid from (not too) long ago would run two blocks to get to the red box chained to the telephone pole in order to read their columns, they were now all gone.

And they were all so young. Reynolds was 78. Donaldson was 73. Martone was 66. For many years during The Curse, Red Sox fans would bemoan, "These Red Sox are going to kill me." Maybe covering the Red Sox and Patriots all those years did take a toll on these passionate sports writers.

One doesn't want to speculate on Donaldson's cause of death, but he had been very active on X just the day prior to his death.

Our thoughts go out to his family during this difficult time – made even harder coming just days before Christmas. I think about the gifts he may have bought that he will never be able to give as well as gifts that had already been bought for him which he will never be able to open.

Anyone who has lived in Rhode Island, however, is grateful for the gift he gave all of us of his columns that he wrote for over 38 years working for the Providence Journal.

May you rest in peace, Jim Donaldson. Say hi to Bill and Art for us. And can you all help the Patriots out next year, please!