By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Written for the Louisiana Sports Writers Association
He was a tagalong, only eight years at the time, but the kid had a fascination with all of the things a newsroom had to offer in the 1960s.
The cigar smoke. The pounding of the typewriter. The clicking of the teletype machine. Most of all, the chatter.
Grown men talking about grown men stuff.
“I’d sit there with my dad and all the sports writers,” he says today, “and just take everything in.”
Until one day when Bud Montet, then the sports editor of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, called the kid over and handed him a few pieces of paper. “Can you write me four or five paragraphs on this BREC softball game?” Montet asked.
And the boy set about that task on a manual typewriter, two fingers hunting-and-pecking all the way, with the mission of crafting the best BREC softball game story that has ever been written by an eight-year-old.
“I knew then,” Ron Higgins says today, “that this is what I wanted to do.”
It has carried him into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame as a 2024 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award in Sports Journalism. He is part of the 12-member Class of 2024 to be honored June 20-22 in Natchitoches. For participation opportunities, visit LaSportsHall.com or call 318-238-4255.
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Appropriately, there is a story about how Higgins got started as a sports writer because stories are what he is all about.
Though he still uses that hunt-and-peck style he learned as an eight-year-old, Higgins doesn’t write with his fingers.
He writes with his eyes.
He writes with his ears.
And he writes with his heart.
(His fingers just do the dirty work).
There are stories about covering games all over the South, stories about interview subjects that nobody else had ever heard of and stories about situations he just happened to walk into. But before you can read it, first he had to see it. Hear it. Feel it.
In a 45-year career that has included an amazing 11 stops along the way, Higgins still has a hard time deciding what he enjoys the most about covering sports.
Maybe it’s the big games. Or the off-the-wall quotes. Or giving a hard-line opinion when the situation calls for it. Or the below-the-radar feature stories that he finds that nobody else seems to.
“I have always loved a long-form feature,” he says. “But then again, I like the immediacy of a really good game story. I love covering events because you never know what’s going to happen in a game. That’s the beauty of it and you get to write it that way. And I like writing columns because I’m opinionated. When you’ve done it as long as I have, you’ve got a pretty good perspective. I wish I had that perspective about 30 or 40 years ago.”
Maybe even longer than that.
Higgins had bylined stories before he had a driver’s license. (“Mother would drop me off at the games and come back and pick me up,” he says.) He’d go into postgame locker rooms and football coaches thought he was the towel boy.
There’s no mistaking it any more. Higgins is going to be in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, alongside sports and sportswriting heroes from his youth, and throughout his career.
“Even after they told me, I had a hard time believing it,” Higgins says. “There are so many other people in this state, which has had a history of great writers, that I think deserve it more. But I’m truly honored to be selected. It’s been my life’s work. It’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was a boy.”
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You want stories? Here’s one.
On Jan. 11, 1980, Higgins had a morning appointment to talk to LSU defensive coordinator Greg Williams. Fresh out of college as a 1979 LSU graduate, Higgins was working for Tiger Rag and didn’t bother to listen to TV or radio that morning as he made his way to the LSU football office.
When he arrived, he could instantly feel that something was wrong.
“I walked in and everybody is crying and I asked what happened,” Higgins remembers. “That’s when they told me Bo’s plane went down.”
Bo Rein, who had been hired only two months earlier, had left Shreveport the night before to return back to Baton Rouge after a recruiting trip and the plane he was on crashed in the Atlantic Ocean. (The cause of the crash was probably cabin depressurization causing a lack of oxygen.)
“I didn’t even know what to say at that point,” Higgins says. “I realized that I don’t think I can walk into anything worse than this.”
He explained that he had an appointment with Williams. He was told that Williams was in his office and, amazingly, had put Rein on the plane the night before in Shreveport.
Williams invited Higgins into his office. “All I asked him was ‘What happened?’” he says. “And he just started talking.”
Less than a year out of college and Higgins was listening to a man who had just lost one of his best friends and could have easily been aboard that plane had he not made other last-minute plans.
Not exactly a situation they teach you in a journalism classroom.
Higgins followed up with Williams, who had retired from coaching, for a reflective 2015 story that won first place in the LSWA’s annual writing contest.
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And the reason why that young boy was in smoke-filled newsrooms back in the 1960s? That’s because the Ron’s father was Ace Higgins, who was the longtime Sports Information Director at LSU.
In those days, Ace Higgins would come to the Morning Advocate newsroom three times a week and help write stories to put the sports section together.
But Ace Higgins was much more than that. He was the school’s SID when Billy Cannon won the Heisman Trophy. And when LSU had 13 first-team All-Americans. And when Pete Maravich showed up and changed the way college basketball was played.
Three days before Christmas in 1968, Ace Higgins died of a heart attack. He was 45 and left behind a 12-year-old son.
“I think about him every day,” Ron Higgins says. “Every press box I go in, there is somebody who knew him and they’ll talk to me about him.”
When Higgins was hired by the Shreveport Journal in December 1982, the second column he wrote was a tribute to his father, Ace.
“My dad never intended for me to be a sportswriter,” Higgins says. “So he never really knew how much influence he had on me.”
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com