Chris Dortch’s phone includes numbers from 2,314 contacts. Most are college basketball coaches, athletic directors, and members of the media.
In short, if anyone needs to know anything about men’s varsity hoops, Dortch is your man.
This week I am doubly pleased to see not one but two of my cronies in the Tennessee Sportswriters Hall of Fame: Dortch and Dan Fleser.
Dan worked with me at the Knoxville News Sentinel. He is known for his coverage of Lady Vols basketball, but he was involved in everything from preparations to UT football and baseball to the Olympics.
Mike Strange:Sportswriter Dan Fleser has done it all; good to see recognized
I wrote about Dan last summer when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Greater Knoxville Sports Hall of Fame.
As Fleser recounted Pat Summitt’s NCAA hat-trick in the 1990s, Dortch and I were soul mates, covering Tennessee men’s basketball on a much lower level.
Chris’s introduction to the UT hoops came at Johnson City Press in the mid-1980s. After surviving the 1984 crash landing of the ETSU basketball team’s plane in Alabama, he moved to the Chattanooga Times. There he was present on the pitch until he left in 1999 to concentrate on his side projects.
Whenever the Vols played in Auburn, Georgia, or Alabama, I’d pick up Chris at his house in Chattanooga and head south. It was a rare night we described a Vols “W” on those trips.
“I remember a game at Auburn,” Dortch said. “Auburn won 43-35. Cliff Ellis and Kevin O’Neill (the respective coaches) even laughed. They knew how horrible it was.”
I mentioned side projects. One is not “side” at all. It is Dortch’s gift to the sport.
In the early 1980s, Chris got a call looking for someone to preview the Southern Conference for this new preseason basketball publication, the Blue Ribbon Yearbook. He signed up to help Chris Wallace and Joe Lunardi.
Wallace left to become an NBA executive. After Lunardi’s “Bracketology” concert for ESPN turned into a big deal, he too left. Dortch took over in the mid-’90s. He’s had several partners over the years, but she’s his baby. He is working on the 42nd edition.
Blue Ribbon is the bible of men’s college hoops. It is a fact. Every Division 1 school, from Duke to Elon, has a full profile, right down to the benchwarmers. I know because I previewed the Horizon League for Chris for 20 years.
“If you’re in the college basketball business, you know that,” Dortch said.
College coaches use it. The NCAA tournament selection committee uses it. The media use it: Jay Bilas, Dick Vitale, Rece Davis, etc. Hardcore hoop fans devour it.
“My goal was to earn national respect and I think we did that,” Dortch said. “Someone might be better than me, but no one has edited and read more college basketball than I have.”
Blue Ribbon was a conduit for 13 years of creating scouting book drafts for NBA clubs and off-camera work for NBATV.
Chris is also the author of six books. I recommend “String Music, Inside the Rise of SEC Basketball”.
Another theme of the book is his other sports passion, golf. She did a children’s book for Sports Illustrated.
As a real-life sportswriter, it wasn’t hard to play one on the big screen when he landed a cameo as a reporter in “42,” the 2013 Jackie Robinson biopic.
Somehow, he finds time to teach a journalism class at UT-Chattanooga and facilitate the annual Chattanooga Film Festival.
He appears every now and then on Knoxville sports radio or you can still see him in the press line at a stadium near you.
“Basketball was the sport that chose me,” Dortch said. “Giving back to sport is a true honour.”
Mike Strange is a former writer for the News Sentinel. He currently writes a weekly sports column for Shopper News.
