CT’s Woj leaves his mark at the Naismith Hall of Fame

In the days before cell phones, texts and X, information required digging, and breaking stories meant holding your breath until the newspapers landed on the doorsteps. One of Adrian Wojnarowski’s early cold-calls was answered by Ray Allen, a teenager in South Carolina who told him he was going to UConn.

“I remember telling Ray, ‘Could you please just not answer your phone the rest of the night when all these reporters call you?’” Wojnarowski said. “… I don’t think that happened. Ray was going to talk to anybody.”

If this happened a couple of decades later, with the ability to disseminate information in real time, it would’ve been what the basketball world came to know, and anticipate as a “Woj Bomb.” As it was, readers of the Waterbury newspaper where Wojnarowski worked in 1992 got the news in print the next morning.

The anecdote, however, is the most Woj thing imaginable for those who know him. Ahead of the curve, aggressive, and fiercely competitive, all the characteristics that drove Adrian Wojnarowski from Bristol Central High, to The Courant, where he took high school games over the phone as a high school and college student, on to jousting with the “horde” of writers covering UConn men’s basketball for state newspapers in the 1990s.

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His great, defining move at age 37, during the infancy of the internet/iPhone/social media age, was to leave a coveted columnist position in New Jersey to chase NBA breaking news for Yahoo! Sports, and eventually ESPN. It made him a world-wide basketball force, not self-proclaimed, an influencer by virtue of his, wait for it, credibility. 

One year ago, Woj decided it was time, the 24/7 news cycle had taken its toll, and he dropped his last Bomb. (No, not the Dan Hurley/Lakers story). For a fraction of the salary, Wojnarowski left the industry on top to become the men’s basketball GM at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure in New York.

“It’s been everything I would have hoped, and more,” Wojnarowski said. “A lot of learning, that’s what has been exhilarating to me, to learn something completely new at 56 years old, to challenge yourself, get out of your comfort zone. And there are things that carried over from what I used to do that have been very helpful.”

On Friday, basketball and the community that covers it will call Woj back for a curtain call. He will receive the Curt Gowdy Award from the Naismith Hall of Fame, recognizing individuals in the media for contributions to the game, on Friday at Mohegan Sun, part of the Class of 2025 induction that will include UConn greats Sue Bird and Maya Moore.

“I just felt like I was doing my job,” Wojnarowski said. “I was just so caught up in that. The business evolved, and I was really lucky; my timing was really good. Going to Yahoo! around the time of Team USA , the super teams (in the NBA) starting to form, and now there was this whole different appetite for information on trades and potential trades, creating cap space, the GMs are becoming more prominent in the public eye and all the moves they’re making.

“It just lent itself to what I was doing. I was the beneficiary of fortuitous timing. It just became this insatiable appetite that maybe we helped create for information in real time.”

Long before all of that, Woj was in competition with an army of aspiring sports reporters in The Courant’s newsroom on Broad Street, college students bucking to be the next full-time hire, high school reporters hoping to land the next major beat.

“All those things prepared me,” he said.

That’s where we got to know each other during the late 1980s and, trust me, it was apparent then that this earnest kid from Bristol had some extra gear the rest of us did not. Never risk-averse, he moved around the country, to Waterbury to get on the UConn beat, to Fresno, Calif., to cover Jerry Tarkanian, to Bergen County, N.J., where he authored the book, “The Miracle of St. Anthony,” a season with Bob Hurley Sr. and his high school program.

A rare combination of relentless reporter and elegant writer, Wojnarowski’s career soared in legacy media. When he left The Record in Jersey in 2007 to go to Yahoo!, an editor said, “I wish you the best, but I gotta tell you, I’m worried nobody’s ever going to hear from you again.”

“And I remember walking to my car thinking, ‘He might be right, but I’m still going to do this,’” Woj said. (Full disclosure: I also thought he was crazy.) Though he never aspired to be on TV, Wojnarowski ultimately starred on any and every platform he ascended.

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“The cell phone changed everything,” he said, “more than the internet changed it, and Twitter changed it. … It used to be our competition was the competitors at the other papers, the other networks. Your competition now is misinformation. It’s not necessarily the guy you’re breaking the story against, it’s making sure people understand the difference between what’s credible news, credible journalism and BS, nonsense. It’s more confusing to people than ever.”

When Wojnarowski decided it was time to do something new, his son and daughter grown, he and his wife, Amy, moved back to Western New York, where they met as Bonnies. He revealed he was diagnosed with a low-grade form of prostate cancer, treated effectively as it was caught early, so he takes every opportunity to urge men to get screened. “By the time you know you feel sick or have symptoms, it could be too late,” he said. “I just want other people to catch it as early as I did.”

This is no retirement or laurels-resting gig for Wojnarowski. Looking for talent for the Bonnies to unfurl takes him all over the world, he recently ran into Hurley and his staff at a tournament in Switzerland, and keeps him on the phone with his old NBA contacts, agencies and front offices, to get information for coach Mark Schmidt. He calls on his journalism skills to take deeper dives into potential recruits, ask different questions than one from a traditional coaching background.

“Having had an entire recruiting cycle and bringing in 11 new players,” Wojnarowski said, “and you imagine how they might get along, how they might complement each other. We want gym rats, guys who love to play, guys we can’t keep out of he gym, and we’ve got that. It’s really the part of it that’s gratifying.”

There are consequences for getting it wrong as a reporter, particularly a reporter of Woj’s reputation, but now there’s a different layer. The basketball program means a lot at St. Bonaventure, always has, and to its alums. With the limited funds available at an Atlantic 10 Conference program, a mistake in recruiting can be difficult to overcome.

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“If we weren’t playing basketball at this level, it’s an existential threat to the university,” Wojnarowski said. “Basketball is what brings everybody together. So I feel tremendously accountable. I mean, I was in a very competitive world, right? This is like that, times 100.”

In other words, Woj is wired for it. This weekend, Wojnarowski will be back in Connecticut, surrounded by family and friends, to receive the Curt Gowdy Award and give his acceptance speech at Mohegan Sun, on the eve of the induction ceremony in Springfield on Saturday. Of course it’s Friday; who else would be hearing all the behind-the-curtain induction stuff the night before?

“The one thing I I still have, very much, is the competitiveness,” Woj said. “At ESPN I was super competitive and that drove me, I’m just channeling it in a different way now.”