Some people know all along exactly what they want to be when they grow up, and Jeff D’Alessio (pictured at right) is one of those people. In 1981, as a sixth grader in Syracuse, New York, Jeff stood up in front of Sister Helen’s class and said, “I want to be the editor of The Sporting News.”
And now, 28 short years later, after college at St. Bonaventure and stops in Huntington, W.Va., (wait for it) Champaign, St. Louis, Melbourne, Fla., and Atlanta, he’s filling exactly that role (since May 2008) for The Sporting News, which is now based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
(Full disclosure: The Sporting News was the first magazine that I subscribed to. Before Highlights. Before Ranger Rick. They couldn’t read my seven-year-old handwriting, so I was Joe L. Gillespie for the first couple of years of Bible of Baseball goodness. Ah, the good old days of poring over a full week of box scores at once. OK, enough nostalgia, on to the story…)
If any of you longtime Illini fans out there have trouble separating D’Alessio from Lon Kruger in your mind, there’s a good reason for that: his time as the News-Gazette‘s Illini basketball beat reporter (after a couple of years of covering high school basketball for the paper) almost exactly coincided with Kruger’s tenure as head coach, from 1996 to 2000. You can still find some of his work on IlliniHQ, like this entry from November 1996.
“They were kind of up-and-down back then,” he recalled. Indeed, in Kruger’s four years at the helm, the Illini won 20 or more games three times, but never won more than 23 and never lost fewer than 10 games, and never advanced to the Sweet 16.
In fact, one could argue that the most memorable run that the Illini had during the Lon Kruger era was during the team’s worst season, 1997–98 1997–98, when the team finished 14–18 overall and 3–13 in league play, drawing the 11th seed in the Big Ten tournament. D’Alessio had the following recollection:
“They were playing one of the favorites in the first round, and they were expecting to get slaughtered. So, Jim Rossow, the sports editor, and I, went up there to Chicago and booked a hotel room for one night, we brought one change of clothes, and of course, they went on, won three games and made it to the championship game on Sunday. We were wearing the same stuff, I think we ended up having to book rooms in three different hotels because everything was sold out. But covering that team was a lot of fun, they didn’t have the Dee Browns and Mike Davises on that team, but they had Frank Williams and Sergio McClain, and Jerry Hester was on that team, so it was a lot of fun.”
Kruger and D’Alessio had a tumultuous relationship during that time, but the coach actually ended up giving the reporter his biggest scoop of his time in C-U. “When you’re in that line of work, the ones that you’re proudest of are the ones that you beat everyone to, [where] you break the story,” D’Alessio explained. “The biggest one that I broke during that time was Lon Kruger actually leaving to take the job with the Atlanta Hawks, which didn’t turn out too well, obviously, for him, but it was an interesting story in a lot of ways.
“I guess now, he wouldn’t mind that I revealed this: I didn’t write this, but he’s actually the one — because he wanted to keep it anonymous — but he’s actually the one who gave me that story. I was the beat writer for the hometown paper. And he calls, and he says, ‘I’ve got a big story for you here, and you can’t put my name and say it was from me, but tomorrow morning I’m leaving for Atlanta and I’m taking the job and leaving for the NBA.'”
D’Alessio now presides over The Sporting News Today, an online newspaper that has more than a half-million subscribers, but during his time at the News-Gazette, the technology was a little more rudimentary. “I worked on something called a Tandy 800 computer, and you could see six lines of your story as you wrote,” he recalled. “[There was] no internet access, I never had internet access when I covered a college basketball game. We did stuff the hard way, making phone calls… it was a lot more personalized back then. I covered Illinois basketball for four years, and I went to every practice they ever had during that time. Nowadays, you could find out pretty much everything you needed to know by looking at some website. Back then, you had to show up and see it and talk to people to do your job.”
Despite the number of years that have passed since he departed C-U, D’Alessio hasn’t left the community behind. “I say this without exaggeration: It’s probably as good of a six years that I’ve had in my life, for a lot of reasons.” For one, he met his wife, a C-U native, here, under pretty unique circumstances. “Her name is Christa. She was actually going to the U of I at the time, and her father was a professor in Media and Speech Communications. She was looking for a part-time [job] and liked sports a little, and she found one at the News-Gazette.
“She was one of the people who’d take high school scores over the phone when Arcola would call in with a high school game on Friday night and she’d take it. I happened to be — the writers used to trade off training the scoretakers, as we called them — and I was the person who was training them at the time, and that’s where I met her. It turned out two years later, we got married at the Catholic church in Urbana.”
For that reason, he still comes back to the area regularly. “I would definitely go back if there was an opportunity someday,” he noted. “My in-laws still live there, so we go back a couple of times a year. We always go to the same place, I still miss the sandwiches at the Esquire, and I miss going to Illnois games. It was as good a six years as I’ve ever had.”
D’Alessio also praises the experience of working with his N-G colleagues like Rossow, Bob Asmussen, Loren Tate, and Paul Klee. “There are still some people there who are among my closest friends,” he said.
Now he oversees an editorial staff of 60 and has writers stationed around the country. It’s a far cry from the late ’90s, but D’Alessio wouldn’t have it any other way. “I really feel blessed. I have the best job out there right now.” Just like he foresaw it so long ago.