Late Chicago Tribune sports writer Bob Logan to be inducted into U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame

Former Chicago sports writer Bob Logan, who spent 28 years reporting for the Chicago Tribune, will be inducted posthumously into the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame.

Logan, who died in 2006 at age 74, was one of seven inductees for the Class of 2023, along with M.A. Voepel of ESPN, Seth Davis of The Athletic and CBS Sports, Carl Adamec of the Manchester (Conn.) Journal, Lesley Visser of the Boston Globe and CBS Sports, Kevin Scarbinsky of the Birmingham (Ala.) News and AL.com and Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated, CBS Sports and Fox Sports.

The group will be honored at the USBWA Awards Luncheon on April 3 at the Marriott Marquis Houston. The USBWA said the seven were “considered pioneers, mentors and exemplary examples of basketball journalism among their peers.”

Nicknamed “Lefty,” Logan was an old-school, Runyonesque character who covered all sports and was prolific reporting on games on deadline. But Logan was most at home writing about basketball, including the Chicago Bulls, Illinois, De Paul, Loyola and hundreds of Big Ten matchups.

After leaving the Tribune in the late 1980s, Logan spent 13 years at the Daily Herald. He authored eight books and wrote the annual basketball summary for the Encyclopaedia Britannica for 25 years.

“A titanic tussle of two evenly matched teams” was a go-to line Logan often bellowed in press boxes to describe a boring game between bad teams. A typical Logan game story included some game action surrounded by colorful wordplay, like his description of a DePaul-Loyola game in 1988.

“Near the end of De Paul`s 93-77 romp over Loyola, the fans were thinking mainly about the pizza promised them if the Blue Demons hit the 90-point mark. They chanted, stomped and roared for their payoff until Kevin Edwards served it up piping hot with a free throw 49 seconds before the final horn.”

When Logan died, the Tribune’s Dave Van Dyck wrote that he was “a journalism original, an irreplaceable piece of a Chicago sports scene where characters were seen and followed on the pages of newspapers.”

The USBWA announcement called Logan “one of the most prominent basketball writers in the Midwest during his career of more than 40 years.”