Tim Layden

By Jack Rightmyer

Age: 64

Residence: Simsbury, Conn.

Hometown: Whitehall

Family: Wife, Janet; Children, Kevin, 29, design engineer for Apple, Kristen, 32, TV writer in Los Angeles

Sports: Running and Biking

Occupation: Writer-at-Large for NBC Sports

Whitehall native Tim Layden has gone about as far as any sports journalist can. He started as a local high school sports reporter, moved on to Newsday a more national newspaper in Long Island, and for 25 years was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated covering 14 Olympic Games, 10 NCAA Final Fours, three Super Bowls, and eight college football national championship games. Today he is a writer-at-large for NBC Sports where he produces written features and video essays.

“Sports was a big part of my childhood,” he said from his home in Simsbury, Conn. “I played football, basketball and ran track in high school. All I cared about was sports when I was growing up in Whitehall.” He remembers well his senior year when his Whitehall High School football team was undefeated. “I wrote a piece about that for Sports Illustrated in 2017, about my football friendships, and what that team meant to the town. I have no familial connection to Whitehall today, but it’s a very evocative place when I drive through. It’s loaded with mostly good memories for me, but the town has fallen on hard times, and hasn’t been able to recreate itself.”

Whitehall is situated in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains at the northern tip of the Champlain Canal. It is referred to as the birthplace of the U.S. Navy primarily because back in 1776 the Colonists assembled a fleet of ships in the town’s harbor that eventually sailed north under Benedict Arnold to fight the British in the Battle of Valcour Island. Today the town is not a tourist destination or anything like a charming, quaint Vermont village. “It’s trying,” Tim said, “but there’s some super high poverty there and it’s struggled with an opioid problem.”

His father, who was a prominent attorney in Whitehall, used to get three newspapers – New York Daily News, Glens Falls Post Star and Albany Times Union – every day. “When I was 10, I’d get up first and walk down to the grocery story, Jumbo’s IGA, pick up the papers and run home with them. I’d sit at the dining room table and read the sports section of those three papers before I went to school. I did that from late elementary school all the way through my senior year in high school.”

He got his first subscription to Sports Illustrated in 1965 when he was nine years old. “I’d read that cover to cover every week. That’s when I began to discover some of my favorite sports writers. I just became immersed in it, and every Thursday when that magazine showed up in my mailbox, well, that was hugely significant to me.”

After graduating from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Tim got his first job as a sports reporter at The Schenectady Gazette in 1978. “My newspaper background has served me better than anything else in my career. It taught me speed and brevity. When I began, I was the guy in the office who answered the phone, took down the score, and then wrote a three-paragraph story from that. That taught me to process information quickly, get the facts right, and make sure all the names were spelled correctly.”

He spent eight years at the Gazette and then moved on to the Times Union for a little over two years. “Now I was writing features, and I had a column. The TU had a much larger canvas and I was able to travel to some big events like the 1986 World Series between the Mets and Red Sox. I was covering some national stories like Mike Tyson fights and the Saratoga Race Track. It was a vibrant newsroom and an exciting place to work.”

After working for six years at Newsday he received a phone call one Saturday morning. “My wife Janet picked it up and with her hand over the phone she whispered to me, ‘It’s a guy named Peter Carry, an executive editor, from Sports Illustrated.’ I remember thinking, ‘Ok, this could be exciting.’”

A meeting was set up and soon Tim was offered a job to cover college football. He did that for five years and then he picked up the Olympic sports of track and field and alpine skiing. In 2001, he began covering horse racing and in 2005 moved on to the National Football League. “It was so stunning to get that phone call at 10am on that Saturday morning from Peter Carry. I never expected it to happen, to be able to write for this magazine that I had been a devoted follower of since I was 10 years old.”

For the past 30 years Tim Layden has had a front row seat to some of the biggest sports events in the world and witnessed some of the most marvelous sporting accomplishments. “There is so much that stands out, like every race Usain Bolt ran. I will never forget American Pharaoh winning the Triple Crown at Belmont. It was the most emotional I’ve ever felt since I was a kid. I waited so long for a horse to do that, and Belmont was so wild that day. It felt like a church revival.”

Other highlights included watching the Christian Laettner shot for Duke against Kentucky in 1992, the David Tyree helmet catch when the Giants beat the Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl, all of Michael Phelps swimming gold medals, and the 1986 World Series win by the New York Mets. “In a strange way,” he laughed. “I often remember the stories I wrote more fondly than the events.”

He feels it’s important for a journalist to maintain a professional relationship with the people you are covering. “I decided a long time ago that I would never be friends with someone I’m covering because I might have to write something negative about them. As a sports journalist, I’m also very different than professional athletes, who are often worth well over one-hundred million dollars. I can call up Drew Brees, Michael Phelps or Lindsey Vonn and talk with them about things. I feel a kinship when we talk, but it’s always at arm’s length.”

He does have a few regrets as a journalist. “I wish I had been more aggressive in writing about athletes, like track star Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong, who were obviously using steroids and doping. They were accomplishing amazing things and yet there were rumors and suspicions they were not clean. I chose not to chase it. I liked my access. They were giving me some great stories. I let myself go along for the ride. I even did it back with Mike Tyson, when I was in the Capital District, and we got a lot of tips about some of the nasty stuff he was doing. With Tyson I was able to go to Las Vegas and get access to all that celebrity.”

A different kind of regret was that he didn’t run track as a student at Williams College. “I always liked to run during my football and basketball practices, and in 1980 I committed myself to becoming a good runner.” At that time in the late 1970s and through the 1980s Albany and Schenectady were places where there were many races and many good runners. “I did some hard training and attended a lot of local track meets and ran many road races.”

He’s proud of many of his times like the 1:58 half-mile, 4:21 mile, 4:02 1500, 9:46 two-mile, 15:43 5K, 32:51 10K, and 51:00 15K he ran at his best Stockade-athon. “I trained three times to run a marathon and got hurt every time. I wanted to run a fast marathon, something like 2:35. I wanted to kill it, but my body seemed to not be cut out for intense marathon training.”

Tim was an active runner through the fall of 2005. “My last run was in Helsinki, Finland, when I was covering the World Track Championships. I ran five miles on a Sunday morning and a few days later I had my third arthroscopic surgery on my left knee. The surgeon told me there was nothing he could do and that I would need a knee replacement.” He switched to biking at that time and eventually did have the knee replacement in 2018. “I can actually run a bit now, but mostly I bike.”

Today he is a writer-at-large and on-air journalist for NBC Sports. “A few years ago, things began to change a bit at Sports Illustrated. I wasn’t sure where the magazine was going. It was up for sale. I never had a bad day at work in 25 years, and I didn’t want to hang on at what might be a troubled time there.”

He’s enjoying the chance to still write long pieces for NBC and to do his on-air essays, such as the seven-minute piece he did the day of the Belmont on Jack Knowlton, the owner of Funny Cide – the 2003 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner – and Tiz the Law, the horse that recently won the Belmont. 

“The TV stuff is a different kind of writing. I like it. It challenges me, but I’m really a print writer at heart.”

Jack Rightmyer (jackxc@nycap.rr.com) was a longtime cross country coach at Bethlehem High School and today is an Adjunct English Professor at Siena College. He has written two books “A Funny Thing About Teaching” and “It’s Not About Winning.”