So long Bunky, you'll be missed: Bill Reynolds, Providence Journal columnist, remembered

Rhode Island lost a journalistic legend on Thursday.

Bill Reynolds, Providence Journal columnist for almost 40 years, author of a dozen outstanding books, and hall of fame Brown basketball player, has left us at 78.

It’s a bit surprising to me to picture Bill at that age, since he was always a kid in both heart and looks, pecking out his columns with two index fingers with tousled hair, rumpled shirt and an impish smile whenever I’d stop by his desk.

He was still at it at 74, and when I’d ask why he didn’t retire, he’d shrug and say what’s better than this – being paid to go to games.

If you asked Bill about his life accomplishments, he’d tell you he was first a player of basketball, and indeed, he was nicknamed “Shooter” and still part of a regular pickup hoops group into his late 60s, known for his jump shot.

But as good as he was at basketball, he was even more gifted as a writer.

His was the kind of column that captured not just sports, but life. Example: I just Googled "Bill Reynolds stories," and the first that came up was about a 2019 reunion dinner of his Barrington High basketball team.

A typical sentence: “That gym inside the high school was our own little dream palace, and to play there in that long-ago winter of 1962 was to be living inside a childhood fantasy.”

Bill Reynolds had that same touch in everything he wrote.

In his book “Fall River Dreams,” he spent the 1992 season with the hardscrabble Durfee High basketball team, which included future NBA star Chris Herren. Bill’s preface gives a glimpse into what it took to do such a book – while writing four columns a week for The Journal: “I rode the school bus to away games. I went to class with some of the kids. I hung out in the corridors and the cafeteria. I gave them rides home.”

Later, Chris Herren had a spectacular fall from the NBA to heroin addiction, and Bill wrote a powerful book called “Basketball Junkie” in Chris’ voice that began this way: “I was dead for 30 seconds. That’s what the cop in Fall River told me.”

Yes, it was an “as told to” book, but trust me, it’s a special writer who knows how to so powerfully capture a voice and story.

But Bill also stood out for bringing humanity to his work. He didn’t just embed as a writer and then go home. A few years ago, after Bill retired, I talked to Chris Herren, who now runs rehab programs.

Herren told me he was forever touched when Bill visited him in the hospital after an overdose, and it wasn’t for a column at that point; Bill was just there as a friend, and the two even wept together.

I was equally moved when I asked former Providence College coach Ed Cooley, who grew up in poverty in Providence, about Bill. Cooley, being a national figure, had been covered by countless journalists, but Bill brought a humanity that Cooley saw nowhere else.

“I never told a writer I loved him,” Cooley told me. “But I love Bill Reynolds.”

Bill spent another year writing a book on the 2012 Hope High School basketball team, but it was really about challenged urban kids finding sports as something to hold onto: “Kids,” Bill wrote, “who live in fear of gritty streets where there are too many drugs, too many gangs, too many guns and too little hope that it’s going to change anytime soon.”

Liz Abbott, Bill’s partner of 37 years, told me on Thursday such writing reflected Bill’s deep concern for the underprivileged. He had best-sellers, including a book on Rick Pitino when he took the PC team to the Final Four, but he also wrote about struggling kids on urban teams.

'He cared about people who weren’t normally noticed'

Although Bill’s hometown was Barrington, where he began his career as a high school English teacher and coach before joining The Journal in 1981, he was equally interested in writing about places like Central Falls.

“He cared about people who weren’t normally noticed,” Liz told me. “He wrote often about disadvantaged kids and what sports could do for them.”

Bill got countless accolades, including induction into the National Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, but you’d never know it by talking to him. Liz said he was never into prestige or calling attention to himself. When she pictures him now, it’s Bill with a reporter’s notebook in hand, anonymously ambling with an athlete’s grace to the next interview. Often, he found a unique angle. While most reporters clustered around the victors, Bill was getting a better story in the losers' locker room.

Liz was often touched by the way Bill would step out of his reporter’s role to make a personal gesture. Once, he was with an 18-year-old disadvantaged player who mentioned some upcoming banquet he was going to. When Bill heard he didn’t have a suit, he told the kid he’d buy him one.

“The young man picked out a Giorgio Armani suit,” Liz recalled with a chuckle, “and Billy didn’t care – he paid anyway; he just wanted to help him.”

Another time, after covering a practice, Bill was giving some kids a ride home to the Chad Brown project when one got a call on his cell, the voice on speaker asking who was driving him.

“You know,” the kid answered, “the book dude.”

Liz afterward got a T-shirt for Bill with that phrase printed on the fabric.

Bill and Liz met 37 years ago at The Providence Journal, where both were writers.

“It was a newsroom romance,” Liz said.

It proved a lasting match, Liz admiring Bill’s work ethic, curiosity and concern for people.

“He loved to write and was a voracious reader,” she said.

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Indeed, in Bill’s beloved Saturday “bullet columns” titled “For What It’s Worth,” where he'd call folks "Bunky" as his version of "pal," he almost always had a blurb about the latest book he’d knocked off. He personally wrote a dozen of his own – a huge career mountain to climb. Just weeks ago, his final book came out, a collection of his columns called "Story Days." His agent, David Vigliano, once told me he considered Bill one of the country’s best sports writers.

No surprise − Bill got offers from papers in bigger cities, but as a Barrington and Brown kid, he considered Rhode Island home. That was more important to him than the status of some big city label.

“These are his people,” Journal sports editor Bill Corey said, “these are his places.”

Liz Abbott joked to me that looking back, she’s surprised she fell for “a jock.” But Bill was a lot more than that. “He was this tall, handsome, funny guy with a deep, deep soul,” Liz said. “He had a beautiful spirit. He was the kindest person I know.”

Let me pause to add a personal take. Journalists can be acerbic types, sometimes cynical, but Bill simply wasn’t like that. Of all the people I’ve had a chance to be around many days a week over many years, he was among the small handful who never once seemed short-tempered, judgmental or moody.

Looking back: Journal columnist Bill Reynolds retires

And I can’t ever remember him phoning it in. When I’d be in the newsroom late at night, Bill was often among the few still there, back from some game, pecking away with two index fingers until he got it right. And no matter how slammed he might be on deadline, if you paused at his desk, he’d always lean back with that impish smile and say some version of, “So what are you up to?”

Then he’d go back to it, writing prose that was sure to say something about life as well as sports.

He gave us four decades of that, literature on the run, doing it quietly, humbly, never wanting attention for it.

But he deserves plenty of it, especially on this week of saying goodbye to him.

Billy Reynolds, your work, and life, was a gift to us all.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Bill Reynolds, longtime Providence Journal columnist, remembered