David Benner, the stoic, unflappable Pacers PR guy retires: 'He never sugarcoated anything'

Editor's note: This story was originally published in 2022. We are republishing it following Benner's death on March 1, 2023. Read more about his life and death in this column from Gregg Doyel.

INDIANAPOLIS — David Benner has been the calm, stoic, unflappable PR guy for the Indiana Pacers for nearly three decades. He is the guy who woke up to a 5 a.m. phone call from a reporter about an incident at a strip club he knew nothing about.

He is the guy who has fielded calls about Paul George trade rumors, coaching vacancies, the brawl at a game in Detroit and media hysteria when Michael Jordan returned to the NBA for his first game inside Market Square Arena after retiring.

Benner has been a fierce protector of his players and coaches. He has been a friend to his players and coaches. He has been a man who meant so much in the world of NBA public relations that many can't believe he is really leaving.

One of those people — Reggie Miller — had to make sure Benner knew just how much he meant, before he retires this week from a 28-year run as Pacers' director of media relations.

Doyel: David Benner, a legend at IndyStar and then the Pacers, dies

As the Pacers game was set to begin Sunday, the team honored Benner with a No. 28 jersey. Cameras were flashing. Benner was waving to one side of the crowd at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

"And then they told me to turn around and acknowledge the crowd on the other side," Benner, 66, said with tears in his eyes. "And here comes Reggie. And I lost it."

Miller walks onto the court with his son, smiling, arms stretched out for a hug. "Oh my god," Benner says, as he lifts his arms into the air. The two embrace. Both cry.

“Honestly, it’s so hard in today’s world to find someone who was so genuine and honest and won’t sugarcoat anything and would tell you the truth," Miller said of Benner at halftime of the game. "And that’s the only thing as a professional athlete – and anyone in any walk of life – you want to be told the truth.

"I wouldn’t be in this position at center court talking to all these great people of Indiana if it wasn’t for this man right here.”

Benner still can't talk about that moment without crying. "I wondered... " he said this week from his Pacers office, "if Miller would come."

Of course he would.

'Who's gonna be my Mr. Benner?'

When the Pacers drafted Miller over Indiana basketball favorite Steve Alford in 1987, much of the state took offense. President Donnie Walsh got heated calls to his home phone. Fans were irate.

How could Walsh have taken a gangly player from California over their beloved IU hometown hero.

Benner was a sportswriter for the Indianapolis Star in 1987 and he covered the frenzy. Inside a Turn 2 suite at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Benner landed Miller's first major interview.

"Coming from California, I poured my heart out," Miller said this week of that interview. "‘I’m so excited to be here. I’m just ready to play for the Pacers. I’m gonna do whatever it takes for us to win.’

And he’s like, ‘Son, you sound like a really good kid, but I would’ve drafted Steve Alford.'"

Benner denied that story from Miller on Sunday. “As much as everybody loves you around here, you’re a liar."

However that interview in 1987 actually went, it launched a relationship between the two that turned into more interviews, more banter and eventually, when Benner came to the Pacers in 1994, working for the same team.

"We developed a bond to the point where I trusted him and he trusted me," Benner said. "He ended up being, aside from a work colleague, a very good friend."

When the Pacers called about Benner's retirement, Miller didn't hesitate. He wouldn't for a second miss flying back to Indiana to bid Benner a final farewell inside the fieldhouse. He started to explain the trip to his son, Ryker.

"We’re going to do this for Mr. Benner, daddy’s longtime friend. He’s retiring at the end of the year," Miller told him. "And he’s like, ‘But wait a minute? Who’s gonna do it for me?’"

What are you talking about? Miller asked Ryker. "When I play for the Pacers, who’s gonna be my Mr. Benner?’"

Oh, he has stories to tell

When it comes to being an NBA media guy, Benner said he has been lucky. For the most part, the only criticism that ever came the Pacers' way was based on wins and losses.

But no team can be perfect.

"There were instances where you get a call at 5 o'clock in the morning on an incident at a strip club from a TV reporter asking for comment," Benner said of the 2006 night Stephen Jackson and three other Pacers players allegedly got into a fight at a strip club. "How can you comment on something you don't know about?"

Benner told the reporter: "Let me find out what's going on and let us get back to you."

People often ask Benner if the Pacers-Pistons brawl in 2004 was the worst moment of his career. It's not. Losing the finals in 2000 was.

"It's so hard to get there. When you get that close to a championship just to have that experience and, for the city, what it would mean," Benner says tearing up. "That part of it is really the worst moment."

The brawl was something that happened, he said. "You don't have any control over that. Nobody had control over. It was certainly an interesting couple of weeks."

Benner can't begin to count the number of calls, emails and requests he got from media worldwide after the brawl, but he knows it wasn't as many as the day Michael Jordan sent a fax with two words: "I'm back."

Jordan came out of retirement in March 1995, after a 17-month break from the NBA and a stint in the minors with the Chicago White Sox. His announcement came less than 24 hours before the Bulls were to play the Pacers at Market Square Arena.

The game was already sold out and had a full media contingency even before Jordan revealed his comeback.

Benner's fax machine never stopped printing. He couldn't keep up with the phone calls; his voicemail was constantly full. He had to tell media he could get them in the building but he couldn't guarantee them a seat.

An auxiliary press room was built inside the arena. All of it came together in 24 hours. Benner remembers going home that night and getting about two hours of sleep then being back at 4 a.m.

"It was all hands on deck," Benner said.

Looking back, those were the best of times. Stressful, exciting and a dream come true for a kid who knew he would never make it to the NBA any other way.

'Manual labor. That ain't for me'

Benner grew up in Johnson County, the youngest of four children. His dad, Charles, was a foreman for the commercial print department at the Indianapolis Star and his mom, Emma, worked in insurance.

The family, including brothers, Bill and Larry, and sister, Sue, lived in a farmhouse. "It was very basic. We had one bathroom on the main level and a shower downstairs," said Bill Benner. "We had a coal fire furnace and we had to stoke the fire ourselves. It was a wonderfully basic upbringing."

There was a huge vegetable garden in the yard and the home was surrounded by cherry, walnut and apple trees and grapevines. It was the Benner children's job to keep up the garden and mow the yard.

When they were finished with their chores outside and a little roughhousing (Bill Benner said he liked to throw his brother in the bushes), the family would watch IU games on an old black-and-white TV. On Sundays, it was tuned in to the Chicago Bears.

On special occasions, Benner's parents would take the kids to Pacers games back in the late 1960s and 1970s when the team was in its ABA heyday, winning league titles.

Benner couldn't get enough of sports. He loved sports. But he was never good enough to play. At Center Grove High School, he made the freshman basketball team, but ended up being the 15th man on the bench with very sparse playing time.

The next year, he decided to be the team manager, bringing water to players and helping the coach tape up ankles. He managed the baseball team, too.

In the summers, Benner baled hay and laid sod. It was hot and sticky, dirty and itchy.

"Manual labor. I said, 'That ain't for me,'" Benner said.

But after graduating high school, he wasn't exactly sure what was for him. "I didn't know what I was going to do in life."

His dad mentioned there was an opening for a copy boy at the Star. Benner had no idea what a copy boy was, but he went downtown to the Star and interviewed. He got the job.

Benner stayed at the Star as a copy boy for two and a half years while Bill Benner wrote for the sports department. In his down time, Benner would go to the sports department, sit at a typewriter and write up goofy stories, fake stories, mostly about his colleagues.

And they were good. "Some of his best writing he ever did," Bill Benner said, "were those fake stories."

Being in the newsroom was something Benner loved. And he knew then what he wanted to do. He wanted to one day write real stories. So in 1975, he headed off to IU.

Elite beats: Pacers, Notre Dame and IU

In Bloomington, Benner immediately went to work for The Daily Student, covering intramural sports, men's and women's gymnastics, swimming back in the days of legendary coach Doc Counsilman and men's soccer, when Jerry Yeagley was coach.

"It was a very cool gig for $30 every two weeks," Benner said.

He stayed at IU until 1979, when he came home to finish taking college classes at IUPUI and to work at the Star sports department answering phones. One day in the newsroom, Benner turned to sports editor John Bansch.

"Hey, if I quit taking these classes at IUPUI, can I still have a job?" Benner asked him. Bansch said yes.

Benner was hired to work the desk, but that role eventually evolved into covering whatever sport needed to be covered.

In May 1979, Benner wrote about a fairly new race in the city. "The pitter-patter of many footsteps will be heard today in Indianapolis as the third annual Mini-Marathon takes place," he wrote. The 9:30 a.m. race featured 2,627 runners.

In February 1979, Benner wrote about Larry Bird being held to four points in Indiana State's 91-72 win over Bradley. "How did they do it?" Benner wrote the next day. "Simply by following him around as if he were the Pied Piper and allowing him just enough room to maybe breathe on occasion."

Benner's writing soon turned to his own beat, when he was hired as the Pacers beat writer in 1983. His writing was colorful, even on routine game stories.

"Travel with the Indiana Pacers and you can see the rich and the poor, the healthy and sick, pollution and clean air, mansions and slums," Benner wrote in 1989. "They win seven in a row, and then lose six of seven. Just which way is this elevator going?"

After eight years of covering the Pacers, Benner got another prime sports beat, Notre Dame football. He moved from the Pacers beat in 1991 "right when they were starting to get good," he said. The era of Chuck Person, Rik Smits and Miller.

But covering Notre Dame football in its glory days was something he couldn't pass up. Three years later, he couldn't pass up another offer, covering IU basketball during the Bob Knight era.

"That was the year he kicked his son (Pat) in the Notre Dame game. He headbutted Sherron Wilkerson in the Michigan State game," Benner said. "Every time I got in the car to go to Bloomington or the airport all I could think of was, 'What's it going to be this week? What's it going to be this game?'"

Knight seemed to respect Benner. He was, after all, the "good cop." It was columnists Bill Benner and Robin Miller that could spout off opinions on Knight and IU that rubbed the coach the wrong way.

Benner will never forget the day Knight's secretary called him with Knight on the phone. The coach wanted to know if Benner had any questions for him or needed anything from him as the team headed into a game.

That was surreal. Knight coming to him. Benner was definitely living his dream.

So when the Pacers came to him for a second time before the 1994-95 season about the opening in their public relations department -- they had asked him the year before -- the decision wasn't easy.

"I agonized over it because I loved sports writing. I loved journalism. I loved the newspaper business as it was," he said. "Finally, I figured, I grew up watching the Pacers. I was a Pacers fan at the time. I was 39 and single and figured why not?"

Twenty-eight years later, he can't believe that it's about to be over.

'It just seemed right'

What Benner will miss most, he said, are the relationships. His colleagues, the players, the coaches, the front office. They have been his family for nearly three decades.

"It seemed like a good time," Benner said of his decision to retire. "Partially, it's health because I dealt with cancer, (and I'm) still dealing with it.

Benner fought colon cancer in 2010. He revealed in 2019 that he was battling cancer again. He goes through treatments every two weeks and it "kind of wipes you out for a couple of days," he said.

His job with the Pacers isn't a physically taxing one, but it does take its toll mentally, Benner said. It's every day and it's a lot of time.

"Could I have gone a little longer? Maybe," he said. "But it just seemed right."

Benner is planning to go on the team's last road trip of the season in Philadelphia on Saturday and Brooklyn on Sunday. And then it will be farewell to the Pacers.

“It’s been an epic run through everything, and, David, just want to say thank you for everything that you’ve done for me and so many others," coach Rick Carlisle said at the ceremony honoring Benner Sunday.

But Carlisle isn't so sure it will be a final goodbye.

"You’ve meant so much to so many that it’s hard to believe it’s coming to a close," Carlisle said.  "Although, I don’t think it’s really going to come to a close. I know you’ll be around.”

Benner said he isn't sure what's next. He and his wife, Jane Jankowski, deputy chief of staff for Gov. Eric Holcomb, like to travel. They have two rescue dogs, Walter and Baxter.

There is plenty to do around the house, he said. And he has an Xbox that he's never hooked up.

"We'll just see what happens," he said. "People say, 'Are you going to get bored?' Maybe. I don't know. I might read a book."

As his final days with the Pacers have neared, Benner has been crying a lot. Something completely out of character for him. After all, he has been unflappable for 28 years.

"David has always done an excellent job of hiding his emotions because he wants everybody to believe he's this stoic, never gets moved too high or too low on the needle," said Bill Benner.

But beyond that, Benner has a "genuine understated humility," his brother said.

"David has never put himself out there. He has always been about the Pacers and his job and his relationships," Bill Benner said. "But it's never been about him ever. That's a wonderful, wonderful trait."

IndyStar Pacers beat writer James Boyd contributed to this story. Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana Pacers media relations man David Benner set to retire