‘A welcome escape’: Hilton Head, SC’s Curry Kirkpatrick talks sports from the hall of fame

Writing never came easily to Curry Kirkpatrick of Hilton Head Island.

But that didn’t keep him from being inducted into the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame in June, alongside Hubie Brown, Jackie MacMullan, and the late Stuart Scott.



He was presented by Charles Barkley and Lesley Visser, the woman to work as an NFL analyst on television. He received a plaque so heavy that he and Barkley, the NBA’s 6-foot-6 “Round Mound of Rebound,” could barely lift it to pose for photographs.

When it was shipped to Kirkpatrick’s door on the island, he thought he’d ordered a piece of furniture.

“It’s like a tombstone,” he said.

It’s his link to a hall of fame that includes heavy hitters like Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, David Halberstam, Red Smith, Dan Jenkins, Frank Deford, Vin Scully, Dick Enberg — and Ronald Reagan.

Kirkpatrick wrote for Sports Illustrated for almost 30 years, when there was no internet. As he says, “It was Facebook, it was TikTok, it was everything.”

As a high-schooler, he sent letters to the editor of the weekly magazine. Two of them got published. After earning a degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Kirkpatrick found himself on the staff in New York City.

From 1969 to 1996, he would face a crushing deadline for a piece that could be considered literature every Saturday night.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

So how do you get to the hall of fame?

“Who knows?” said Kirkpatrick, who in 2001 received the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.



“I think I worked hard at writing. It didn’t come natural to me, I don’t think. It was hard work.”

He had an office next door to Frank Deford, his mentor, and across the hall from Dan Jenkins.

“I learned at an early age there are two ways you can do this,” he said. “Everybody marveled at Dan Jenkins who could go to the Masters and sit on the veranda for four days, then write a great story that nobody else could touch in an hour and a half.

“A story could take Frank Deford three days, slaving. You’d read his pieces and it was so brilliant you’d think he could write falling off a log, but he struggled, and I was kind of like that.”

Kirkpatrick focused on college basketball and tennis, but his story that was selected among the top 60 in the magazine’s first 60 years was about the sporting life of President George H.W. Bush.



“You have to love the games,” he said. “There are such great characters in the games. I loved talking to characters and writing about them. As I said in my speech at the hall of fame, Sports Illustrated was never a job, it was an adventure.”

HILTON HEAD

Kirkpatrick was a sidekick to Dan Jenkins when he covered the first RBC Heritage golf tournament in Sea Pines in the fall of 1969. He covered it himself the next year. In 1977 he moved to the island where he vacationed as a boy with his family.

That was the beginning of Hilton Head nosing its way into the pantheon of American sports.

“The Heritage put Hilton Head on the sports map, as it were,” Kirkpatrick said. “It was a huge event, especially when Arnold Palmer won the first one. The story had all these great pictures. The course, and the tournament, was almost a star right out of the box.”

He said his friend Stan Smith also gave the island a claim to fame.

“Stan always kids himself that he is a shoe rather than a human being, but Stan Smith was a huge figure in tennis,” Kirkpatrick said. “He was the Wimbledon champion, the U.S. Open champion, he won the Davis Cup several years and I covered all that in 1972.”

The Family Circle Cup women’s professional tennis tournament in Sea Pines brought all the great names here to play.

“It was such a wonderful venue at Harbour Town. It was almost a cabin-in-the-woods situation, where the courts were set up and surrounded by all that Sea Pines foliage. It was very small, yet it was a national event, on national television. Bud Collins loved it and would come every year. I think it really left a hole when they moved to Charleston.”

And as a college basketball expert, he knows of the reach of another islander.

“I can’t tell you how much Bobby Cremins is beloved on the national scene, by every coach, by every player who ever talked to him or ever knew him. He’s one of great figures in college basketball and of course we claim him here on Hilton Head.”

THE VALUE OF SPORTS

Kirkpatrick, now 79, doesn’t do any writing anymore, other than the occasional pithy letter to the editor and emails to his island friend Ed Ladd about UNC basketball.

He said it’s sad, but inevitable, what is going on in the world of college sports, where everyone is out for themselves and the almighty dollar.

But he still sees value in it for society.

“I know politics has now reared its ugly head and come into sports at every level,” he said. “However, I still think the games themselves have just expanded and improved, and the athletes are so great. I think sports is still a much-needed reprieve from the real world. The rest of the world that is so controversial and sometimes dangerous and sad. I think there is an escape in sports. It’s a needed escape for everybody.”

Sports still offer a human drama, and nobody knows what’s going to happen.

“I think sports is never going to go away. It’s going to get bigger and bigger in our lives. Whether that is good or bad, I don’t know, but I think it is a welcome escape from the real world.”

David Lauderdale may be contacted at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.