Now that television has jumped on the Pro Football Hall of Fame weekend for so much attention, the once lost-to-baseball event has become far more important, far more dramatic. That will continue, particularly with the ongoing retrenchment of newspapers and their shrinking coverage of events away from home.

Too bad about the approaching change, particularly to those of us so long involved in professional football in Canton, Ohio. There is so much there to tell you about, always was, always will be, particularly for those tied so to the professional sports.

I reported three times from Canton and it was frenetic and it was a pleasure. 

First, I reported the John McKay Tampa Bay Buccaneers when they played their once co-expansionist Seattle Seahawk buddies in the Hall of Fame Game. The buddies beat the daylights out of the Bucs, 38-0, embarrassing everybody in that 1984 rout, even the reporters, including Jim Selman and me. It was the end to a lousy trip. We were late leaving the Tampa airport, late to Cleveland, slow to rent a car despite Selman’s high speeds.

We got a ticket returning to Cleveland, suitable, I guess, for the rotten Bucs showing. Might have been the first time Coach McKay used the “We couldn’t score against a stiff wind.” He did say that first.

McKay quit after a 6-10 season that included wins in the last two games. Owner Hugh Culverhouse stunned the football world by hiring former Falcons coach Leeman Bennett to run the Bucs. Bennett had two 2-14 seasons. Culverhouse then named the charismatic Ray Perkins for two more years.

In 1990, I went back to the Fame game, invited to emcee the convention hall breakfast for 5,000 to present the Hall candidates, my biggest audience. Did ok, and the Pro Football Writers of America presented me with a plaque for my contributions to their sport. Got to introduce the inductees who emerged from a tunnel. Wife Linda, little Tommy, small grandson then, and I were taken to the country club there for lunch with all Hall of Famers attending.

When I got there, linebacker-announcer Howie Long picked me up, lifted me high and said, “You did a good job, Tom. Loosened them up. like Dan Rooney (Steelers owner) said you would.” We got to meet perhaps 40 Hall of Famers, or sat with them. Ray Nitschke, a one-time terrorizing Green Bay linebacker, was in charge. He was unchallenged.

Back at the motel, got a call from the office and then from Smokey Solie. Her husband, Gordon Solie, good friend and the radio and television for wrestling and some auto racing in the Tampa area, had died. Solie loved his Chesterfield shorts and his Popov Vodka. I spoke at his funeral service, as did Hulk Hogan, and mentioned the stock prices for cigarettes and vodka were off.

The more recent trip to Canton was on July 29, 1995, for the induction of Lee Roy Selmon into the Hall, the first and only Buccaneer at this point. Next Buc to make it will be linebacker Derrick Brooks, at least five years after he retires from the Bucs. I introduced Selmon. I am no longer on the board, and that is proper. Ira Kaufman of The Tribune is. He knows his way around.

It is never as easy as you may think, not even with a Lee Roy Selmon, to speak there. Sure Selmon had the record, but an anecdote also helped. I told the voters that a Chicago Bear offensive lineman had confided that at the half of his game with the Bucs he told his coach, “I don’t want to go down in a coal mine, or in a diving bell, coach, and I don’t want to go back in and play the second half against Lee Roy Selmon.”