Bezjak still loves sports


By Erica Tovar
EastGators staff writer

DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Lou Bezjak started reading the sports page when he was 5. He knew what time the game started, what teams would be playing and what yesterday's scores were.

"It was that love of sports and the detail of it that was amazing at his age," said Lucy Bezjak, Lou's mother. "We would get a big kick out of it."

Twenty-five years later, Bezjak, an Ohio native who just celebrated his 30th birthday in March, still is involved in the love affair.

As a sports writer for the Florence Morning News, a 30,000-circulation daily in South Carolina, he covers college and prep sports, Florence's Class AA professional hockey team and America's fastest-growing sport, NASCAR -- when it comes to town.

Budget restraints at the Morning News limit Bezjak's visits to racetracks only within driving distance -- Darlington, S.C., Rockingham, N.C., Charlotte, N.C. and sometimes Bristol, Tenn. or Atlanta, Ga. Other races are covered with phone interviews.

Except for a few drivers that stand out for their fiery personalities, as Kevin Harvick and Tony Stewart do, Bezjak says most are down-to-earth guys.

"There's not much to them," Bezjak said. "They're pretty simple guys -- almost boring, at times."

Bezjak first started covering NASCAR at his first newspaper job with the Morganton, N.C., News Herald. It wasn't his first post-graduate job, though. Finding no immediate luck in the job market upon his graduation from Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., he went back home to Struthers, Ohio, and worked at Sam's Club to get health insurance. Ten months later, he landed his first media job as a high school football color commentator with his own call-in show for an AM radio broadcast. The station was a 30-minute drive across the state line to northwest Pennsylvania, and he still kept his job at Sam's Club in order to keep the benefits.

Two summers later, he got the opportunity to color commentate for the Mahoning Valley Scrapers, a Class A baseball affiliate of the Cleveland Indians, and still covered some high school games for the AM broadcast when the Scrapers played at home. But Bezjak still wanted more.

"I wanted to see what else was out there," Bezjak said.

With some experience with the minors, the opportunity arose with the Pittsburgh Pirates' Class A team, except this time it would require him to move out of Ohio entirely, to Hickory, N.C., population 37,000.

He worked there for a season, and a week after it ended he retired from the minors. It was then that he took his first newspaper job as part of a two-person sports staff at the 10,000-circulation Morganton, N.C., News Herald, up the road from Hickory. His main gig was covering Wake Forest basketball and the Carolina Panthers on Sundays. And it was there that he covered his first race at Bristol.

"[The Bristol race] was awesome," Bezjak said. "It pretty much blew my mind away."

Attending that first live race was all it took for him to jump on the bandwagon, and he admits that he watches Speed Channel television program "Totally NASCAR" every day. "After I went to my first race, I was pretty hooked," Bezjak said.

But Bezjak advises novice sports writers to keep up with a wide range of sports -- even NASCAR -- because they don't always know what kind of story will be dropped in their laps.

Or job, for that matter.

A year or so into his sports writing position at the Morganton News Herald, the sports editor left, and Bezjak was offered the job, which he took. He worked there for another year and a half but again found himself seeking a more challenging position at a larger paper. When he learned of the opportunity at the Florence Morning News, he jumped on it.

He enjoys the warmer weather and is thrilled about covering NASCAR, but his Northern roots still give him an itch sometimes. His ideal job would be to cover Duke basketball or the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers, and, although he knows it won't be easy, he's working hard to get there.

"These kinds of jobs are hard to come by -- that's why I need to get better," Bezjak said.

But his hard work seems to be paying off.

"At Evangel, he was very much sports-minded," said Shirley Shedd, associate professor and chair of the Evangel communication department. "He was focused from the beginning on what he wanted to do, and that's probably what made him successful. Some people come in and aren't quiet sure what they want to do and take a while to find it."

Lou didn't have that problem: He knew what he wanted to do when he was 5.