Adrian Wojnarowski has been driving more, and he loves it. Sometimes it’s in New Jersey, where he and his wife Amy have been living in the same house for more than 20 years. Or Allegany, N.Y, a small town south of Buffalo, where he is the general manager of the St. Bonaventure University basketball program and has an apartment above the locally iconic Burton tavern.
Back when he was the biggest newsbreaker in any sport, Wojnarowski would pull over constantly to work, and increasingly used Ubers and car services. Now, he listens to Springsteen and knocks out a few hands-free calls. He’s at the wheel, now.
Woj will visit Toronto this weekend for a free event about Name, Image and Likeness deals and college basketball with Raptors rookie Jamal Shead and others as part of his new job. When he suddenly retired from ESPN in September, it sent shockwaves through the sport. He’s thrilled. Before, it was so hard to just be where he was.
“You’re not easy to be around when you’re distracted,” Wojnarowski says. “ You’ve got this one eye on this other thing that’s got its tentacles into you.
“And so that’s the best part, to me, is how much more present you can be. You sit down to talk with somebody, and you just turn your phone over. I don’t care who’s calling me in the next 90 minutes, unless it’s a family emergency, right?
“And that’s been a welcome change, I’m sure, not just to me.”
Wojnarowski diagnosed with prostate cancer
Prostate cancer was one reason he retired as the pre-eminent NBA insider at ESPN, leaving millions on the table; Wojnarowski was inspired to go public in Sports Illustrated by ESPN anchor Brian Custer, who had gone public with his prostate cancer, which caused Wojnarowski to actually get checked in the first place. Woj, having caught it early, is OK.
Working 12-hour days was the norm for former ESPN NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski.
Luther Schlaifer/Getty Images
But more, he was just done. Wojnarowski was more than scoops, often offering deep knowledge and context based on the work of human relationships. It just took anything he had to give, always.
It started simply: At St. Bonaventure someone told him the editor of the student newspaper lived at the end of the hall, and when he knocked on a door, Mike Vaccaro opened it. Vaccaro, the longtime lead sports columnist for the New York Daily News, invited him to a staff meeting at The Bona Venture.
Woj was home. He projected what Vaccaro called ultra confidence, and ambition. He won a $200 cash award as part of a journalism scholarship and invested in a TRS-80, one of the first smartphones, so he could call papers from other towns and offer to write games when their teams came to campus. He attacked his beats.
He had always wanted to be a newspaper writer. He worked in Waterbury, Conn. for four years, two in Fresno, Calif., and a decade at the Bergen Record in New Jersey. His book “The Miracle Of St. Anthony” resonated, but he didn’t go to Yahoo! until his late 30s. He became Woj to a wider audience there, and he joined ESPN at 47.
Wojnarowski was paid a reported $7 million (U.S.) per year, and wasn’t just famous; he was known. But fame and money weren’t the best part of it for him, and he worried he’d be miserable to be around if he did another year. He walked away from about $20 million.
“He wasn’t any kind of tortured soul … no, the thing is, he never wanted to sacrifice anything,” Vaccaro says. “In Woj’s case, it added to the burden, for lack of a better word. He would put his 12 hours doing his job, but he was also going to do the two hours a day to make sure that his son and daughter didn’t grow up wondering who their father was.”
“I was lucky to be able to do it,” Wojnarowski says, “but I saw the bags under (ESPN NFL insider Adam) Schefter’s eyes on TV the other night, and God bless him, I sent him a text to tell him I love him, but better you than me.
“I just, in my mind, always knew I wasn’t going to grow old in this job; I probably had the foot on the pedal knowing there was an end date coming. My wife and family sacrificed. I didn’t sacrifice. I got to be selfish in my pursuit of doing the craft at a high level or a competitive level. They were the ones who sacrificed.
“I got really lucky. But it got really big, the whole thing.”
Why Toronto matters to Wojnarowski and St. Bonaventure
St. Bonaventure is a 2,760-undergraduate school in the competitive mid-major Atlantic 10. It has a Canadian basketball history, and Wojnarowski rattles off names: Vidal Massiah, Rob Samuels, Rocky Llewellyn, Barry Munger, Caswell Cyrus, Andrew Nicholson. Toronto will be a key focus: if you want to play at a competitive school closer to home, St. Bonaventure is there.
“Toronto needs to be a stronghold for us, and we need to invest in that community, too,” Wojnarowski says. “It’s not enough just to come recruit players, but we need to have a presence there.”
And Woj sells a vision. “There’s a magic to the place there, just a magic,” he says. “I tell this to kids in recruiting all the time now: Either you’ll come and feel it or you won’t. And if you don’t, I understand. Not everyone’s gonna feel it.
“But the guys who do feel it, and it’s true whether you’re a player or a student, you feel it.”
They are selling a community, relationships, belonging. Wojnarowski knows that when the basketball team does well, enrolment goes up. St. Bonaventure has one of the smallest endowments and enrolments in the Atlantic 10. So far this season — and Woj will admit this wasn’t his doing — the Bonnies are 14-2.
“It’s why we’re still competing at this really high level,” he says. “Because people fight for this place.”
Why this place? As much as Wojnarowski loved working with colleagues at ESPN and Yahoo! and newspapers, it was essentially an individual sport; here, he is part of something bigger. And he met Amy at St. Bonaventure, and some of his best friends. His brother-in-law played basketball there, his sister-in-law was a cheerleader, his father-in-law was a student.
Adam Schefter was surprised the first time he heard his friend Adrian Wojnarowski was considering retiring from his job as ESPN’s NBA reporter.
Adam Schefter was surprised the first time he heard his friend Adrian Wojnarowski was considering retiring from his job as ESPN’s NBA reporter.
But it was more than that. That youthful ultra confidence masked insecurity. Woj’s father worked at the New Departure Hyatt Ball Bearing factory in Bristol, Conn., which was the town’s biggest employer before ESPN. His mother worked and then stayed home to raise the kids.
Nobody in his family had ever gone to college and Wojnarowski didn’t even know how to look for one, and only attended St. Bonaventure because his sister Brenda was a secretary for Dale Tepas, who played on the Bonnies’ 1970 Final Four team. He wasn’t sure of himself, in the world.
Wojnarowski found St. Bonaventure, and knocked on Vaccaro’s door, and joined the student paper, and met Amy, and …
“I would say going there, I didn’t have a lot of confidence,” he says. “It gave me confidence and belief. You get older and you see what UCLA looks like, or Syracuse, all these big schools. I couldn’t have handled any of them. I needed a small place. I needed that environment. Looking back, I would have been overwhelmed at a big school, and that’s why some other people choose smaller schools.
“In lots of different ways it was just life-changing for me, and so I hope I can maybe make it a little easier to be that for somebody else.”
Wojnarowski has no regrets
It’s been an adjustment, sure. He was in the gym in October, around NBA Hall of Fame weekend, and a student showed him an Instagram reel of highlights from Vince Carter’s last couple of years in Atlanta that claimed Carter was coming out of retirement. Woj said no, he isn’t. The student brandished the reel, and was convinced.
“I walked away saying that’s where we are, where people can’t tell the difference,” Wojnarowski says. “And not just in sports. There’s great journalism being done, and honest journalism being done, and I was a part of it, and I was around it. But what is harder for people is what has been muddied.”
This job is a joy, though. And when his 22-year-old son Ben graduates from the University of Denver this spring, the family will rent a house in Colorado for five days and gather and celebrate. Had Woj been at the NBA Finals he probably would have flown in and out. He and Amy will spend a couple weeks in Europe this summer and he’ll finally have more time for dinners with Vaccaro and their wives. They live 15 minutes apart, are best friends, and have maybe had dinner together five times in 10 years. Also, Wojnarowski has always approached eating as a speed event: Eat fast, move on.
Happy Woj
I haven’t seen this guy this happy since we were doing happy hours at the Burton 35 years ago
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way,” he says now.
The Bonnies beat Fordham last weekend in New York, and Woj swears there were almost as many Bonnies fans as Fordham fans, and lots of the players’ family members. And Amy was there, and Woj’s 25-year-old daughter Annie and son Ben, Woj’s father-in-law and wife, Woj’s brother-in-law and his nieces. And Vaccaro, too. The Bonnies beat Fordham going away.
“I haven’t seen this guy this happy since we were doing happy hours at The Burton 35 years ago,” Vaccaro says.
“Look, you’re gonna have ups and downs, you’re gonna win games, and I’m sure we’ll lose some more this year too,” Wojnarowski says. “But days like that, for me, make this worthwhile. It doesn’t get better than that. I’ve not looked back for a minute and said, ‘Hey, I wish I was still doing something else.’ That thought hasn’t occurred to me. I love it. I love it.”
Adrian Wojnarowski decided he wanted to truly be where he was, that he wanted to be part of something bigger, and that he wanted to follow his heart, and he took the wheel. We should all be so lucky.
https://www.thestar.com/sports/basketball/adrian-wojnarowski-is-done-living-the-life-of-nba-scoops-and-is-in-his-happy/article_a4c5e92a-cdef-11ef-b649-b7532ab1bb02.html
