After 50 illustrious years as a Denver sports writer, Woody Paige 'beyond honored' by Colorado Sports Hall of Fame induction

In the fall of 1953, Woody Paige was a second grader at Cherokee Elementary School in Memphis, Tenn. The school paper, the Cherokee Chit-Chat, needed some news for the next edition.

So Paige’s teacher approached the youngster during class and gave him an assignment.

“She came up to me and said, 'You’re writing the second-grade news,'" Paige said. “I said, ‘Why me?’ She said, ‘You’re the only one that can spell.'"

So Paige looked around the room for something to write about. He eventually settled on chronicling how the classroom had just gotten a fishbowl with two goldfish, Carlos and Charlie.

"It was a mimeographed newspaper and it came out and it said, ‘Second-grade news by Woody Paige,'" Paige said. “All the other students said, ‘You can write?’ And so I decided that day I was going to be a writer.”

It was the first article written by Paige, and thousands more have followed. After working for various newspapers in Tennessee, he arrived in Denver in 1974 as a sportswriter for the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. He moved to The Denver Post as a sports columnist in 1981 and in 2016 to The Gazette in Colorado Springs and later also The Denver Gazette.

Paige has won more than 150 writing awards during his illustrious career. He branched into radio and television, becoming nationally known for the humorous quips he has made in his thousands of appearances on ESPN's "Around the Horn.”

And on Wednesday night, Paige, 77, will be inducted at the Hilton Denver City Center into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame.

“I always considered him a guy that, if you’re going to get the top story, it’s coming from Woody,’’ said Mike Shanahan, head coach for Super Bowl wins by the Broncos in the 1997 and 1998 seasons. “Whether it was the Broncos or the Avalanche, I don’t care what sport it was, Woody was the center of every top article.”

For the past 50 years, Paige has been the most recognizable sportswriter in Colorado. He has covered more than 40 Super Bowls, including three won by the Broncos. He has chronicled three Stanley Cup victories by the Avalanche, the Nuggets’ first NBA title last year and countless other national and state events, including 14 Olympics.

“You can't write the history of Colorado sports without Woody Paige,’’ said Mark Kiszla, a longtime sports columnist who rejoined Paige when Kiszla moved to The Denver Gazette in January. “Fact of the matter is (Paige) has written much of that history, with a unique style that can be funny, controversial and insightful, often all at the same time.”

Paige has touched readers with columns on the deaths of his father Woodrow Paige Sr. in 1975, his sister Toni in 2006 and his mother, Billye, in 2019 and on the birth of his daughter Shannon in 1977. He once exposed vendors at Mile High Stadium for not checking IDs at a minor-league baseball game when he was able to prove that underage customers were easily able to buy beer. He won a number of suicide prevention awards after he wrote a column following the 2010 suicide of Broncos player Kenny McKinley about how Paige had planned to commit suicide in 2002.

Paige has played blackjack with Michael Jordan. He drank beer with Jimmy Buffett. He had a role in the movie “Rocky Balboa.” He has played a clown in a circus. He flew with the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels and got sick in the process.

Paige and longtime preps writer Scott Stocker will become the sixth and seventh sportswriters to be inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame, following Charles "Poss" Parsons (1982), Leonard Cahn (1985), Dick Connor (1993), Frank Haraway (1994) and Dorothy Mauk (2014). Former Nuggets forward Bill Hanzlik, elected to the shrine in 2004, called Paige’s induction well-deserved but did quip that he will become “the least athletic person that ever has gotten into the Hall of Fame.”

Paige doesn’t deny it feels a bit odd to be inducted into a Hall of Fame that primarily includes athletes, and he just might note in his induction speech that there should be a wing at the Hall devoted to writers.

One thing is for sure about Paige’s induction speech: He will talk plenty about his father.

“I’m beyond honored, but, as I will say in my speech, I’m honored to accept this for my dad,’’ Paige said. “He is the real Woodrow Paige. I’m Woodrow Paige Jr.”

His father suffered from diabetes throughout his life and died at age 42 after having seven different amputations on his left leg. The disease limited what Paige Sr. could do in his life, but not in what he sought to do for his son.

“After the second grade, I wanted to be a writer. We couldn’t afford a typewriter, and my father took a second job fixing TV sets so that he could save up enough money over the years to buy me a typewriter,’’ Paige said of his father, whose primary job was selling men’s clothes at Shainberg’s, a Memphis department store. “I still have that typewriter at home on a desk. It’s an old beater. It’s probably the most meaningful thing I have. I look at it every day, and I think of my dad.”

The Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter, now about 70 years old, got quite a workout during Paige’s days in Tennessee. He became editor of the newspaper at Whitehaven High School and sports editor when he was 16 of the weekly Whitehaven Press. He was editor of the Daily Beacon at the University of Tennessee and worked at the Knoxville Journal and Memphis Commercial Appeal before moving on to Denver.

At the Commercial Appeal, Paige, not long after he had graduated from college, covered civil rights and wrote about the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. He became, at age 23, a sports columnist at the paper, fulfilling a goal he had set in high school.

“I wrote a column for the school newspaper that said when they played the national anthem (at football games), everybody was standing up, but there was no flagpole and so people didn’t know where to look,’’ Paige said. “So I wrote that the county should build a flagpole so people can look at the American flag. I go out the next week and they had built a flagpole, and I thought that I can influence people. I can do this is life.”

Paige wasn’t just writing when growing up in Memphis. He also was hanging out with Elvis Presley.

Paige lived in the same government housing project as the Presley family. Paige would stop by in the early 1950s and watch the aspiring singer, who was 11 years older.

“I was 4 or 5 and I would listen to him play his guitar and sing on the front porch,’’ Paige said. “We became lifelong friends, because I was his first fan.”

When Paige was in high school and Presley had become world famous, the singer would invite him to Graceland and to a Memphis amusement park that would be opened at times between midnight and 6 a.m. for only Presley and his guests. Paige played touch football with Presley and was involved in a game at Graceland in 1960 when the singer fell and broke his right pinky, which became an international news story.

After joining the Commercial Appeal, Paige began to become well-known in the South. He covered the ABA’s Memphis Tams and Southeastern Conference sports. He chronicled Archie Manning, the father of former NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning, when he was a star quarterback at Mississippi.

“He always had a good wit about him,’’ said Archie Manning, who remained close to Paige and then looked on when Peyton starred for the Broncos 2012-2015.

By 1974, Paige was ready to move to a bigger paper. He accepted an offer from The Atlanta Journal before the Rocky Mountain News asked him to fly to Denver for an interview.

Paige didn’t know if he would be a fit for the Rocky and he showed up for the interview with long hair that he said made him look “like some creep out of a hippie movie.” He also wasn’t wearing socks, which has become one of his trademarks.

Thinking he might not get the job, Paige came to Denver with an empty suitcase that he soon filled with Coors beer to take back to Memphis for an expected farewell party for a move to Atlanta. Coors at the time wasn’t sold in the eastern United States.

“They said (in the interview), ‘You’re our guy, because you’re opinionated and you look different and you write different than anybody.’ They said, ‘We’ll give you $10,000 more than Atlanta is offering you,’’’ Paige said. “So I went back to the Holiday Inn and started drinking the Coors. I thought, ‘Gosh, that was the most money I’ll make in my life.’ I was the highest-paid journalist in Colorado at $16,000.”

Paige was assigned to cover the Nuggets and write five columns a week. He was told his hiring was needed for the paper to overtake the rival Denver Post in circulation. But some of his initial columns did not thrill everyone.

“The Broncos had been bad for so long, and I wrote, 'I hate to tell you people, (but) your team stinks,'" Paige said. “So I get a call from (head coach) John Ralston’s PR guy, saying the coach wants to see you in his office. … Ralston says to me, ‘Son, get a haircut and don’t write negative things. We don’t write negative things in Denver.’ I said, ‘It’s not going to be like that anymore,' and I don’t know if he ever talked to me again."

Paige said Ralston, who died in 2019, later kicked him off the team plane because he was improperly dressed. He recalls wearing a T-shirt with an emblem on the front for the rock band Blood Sweat & Tears.

Covering the Nuggets, Paige encountered some more friction. But he remained undeterred.

“I remember Woody calling the Nuggets coaches and GM the 'Three Stooges,'" said former Nuggets star David Thompson, referring to executive Carl Scheer, head coach Larry Brown and assistant coach Doug Moe. “They didn’t like that too well. I thought it was hilarious. … He’d always try to throw in a little jab and have biting commentary, but I liked reading his stuff.”

Former Nuggets star and later head coach Dan Issel said players on the team once voted not to talk to Paige after he had written a negative article. But Issel, who had known Paige since he was covering the Tams, went undercover during the ban.

“I talked to Woody on the phone so none of my teammates would know that I was communicating with him,’’ Issel said. “Woody could tear you up pretty good because he was so clever, but I always enjoyed reading it anyhow.”

Paige moved on to cover the Broncos during their epic "Orange Crush" season of 1977 when they made the playoffs for the first time and advanced to Super Bowl XII before losing 27-10 to Dallas. Paige chronicled the season in “Orange Madness,’’ the first of nine books he has written.

“It was incredible,’’ Paige said. “People had orange toilets. They painted their houses orange. They named their kids (after Broncos players).”

Quarterback Craig Morton said Paige that season didn’t hesitate to “kick my butt in the paper” when he played poorly but he admired him since he “called it like he saw it.” For cornerback Louis Wright, it took some time to get used to Paige.

“I remember once ,(at training camp) in Fort Collins, there were a couple of players saying, ‘Woody Paige is mean. He’s writing smack. Don’t let Woody around,'" Wright said. “But I got to the point where I thought Woody was just doing his job. I really like Woody now. When I first thought he was writing the negative (content), he was just writing the truth.”

After that 1977 season, Paige became only a sports columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and no longer was on a beat. And in 1981, The Denver Post came after him.

The paper had been acquired by the Los Angeles Times and was looking to one-up the Rocky, which had taken a circulation lead — with help from Paige. They offered him a whopping four-year, $500,000 contract, leading to his annual salary of $125,000 dwarfing the $36,000 he was making at the Rocky. He became the highest-paid sports columnist in the country.

“I know this sounds terribly egotistical, but they documented that 40,000 (readers) went with me (to The Denver Post) and they passed the Rocky Mountain News back,’’ Paige said. “So I paid my way.”

Of course, there were some instances when it looked as if Paige might end up losing some money. He was involved in several legal matters.

In the early 1980s, Adrian Brooks, a player for the Denver Avalanche of the Major Indoor Soccer League, had threatened not to suit up for a playoff game unless he was paid additional money. Paige went on television and said he should be "run out of town." Brooks then sued Paige for $16 million.

"On the first day of the trial, Doug Moe testified that I called everybody (bleeps)," said Paige, referring to the then-Nuggets coach. “The judge threw it out.”

After the Colorado Rockies of the NHL moved in 1982 to become the New Jersey Devils, Paige called owner John McMullen a “swamp-swill salesman.” McMullen sued him for $20 million, but that case also was thrown out.

In 2001, Paige became embroiled in a highly publicized legal matter that even The New York Times covered. When now-named Empower Field at Mile High first opened, it was known as Invesco Field. Paige wrote that employees of Invesco Funds in Denver called it “The Diaphragm” because of the structure’s resemblance to a birth-control device.

Invesco, which had paid $60 million over 20 years for naming rights of the stadium, threatened a $50 million lawsuit against The Denver Post, claiming what Paige wrote was false. But it soon was determined the story was true and that an Invesco executive, after some drinking at a Denver restaurant, told Paige about the nickname and handed him his business card.

“They dropped everything after four days, and they fired the guy after they found out who it was,’’ Paige said.

It was around this time Paige also was becoming well-known nationally. Four years earlier, he had written a column before a Broncos playoff game against the second-year Jacksonville Jaguars and called them the “Jagwads” while mocking them as a “goofy” team and ripping their city. Well, the Jaguars shocked the Broncos 30-27 in January 1997 and, on national television, coach Tom Coughlin held up Paige’s column and said it motivated the team.

In the late 1990s, ESPN began a series of interviews with Paige for the Sports Century series in which it counted down the top 50 athletes of the 20th century. Paige recalls being in Panama on Dec. 25, 1999, and surprisingly seeing himself on television talking about Michael Jordan, who was No. 1 on the list.

A few years later, ESPN officials, having liked Paige’s Sports Century work, asked if he wanted to be a part of new sports-talk show called “Around the Horn.”

“They said, ‘You’ll be a national TV star,’’’ Paige said. “I said, ‘I don’t care about being a national TV star.’ I was 54 or something and I just wanted to do my job. … But then they told me what it would pay and I said, ‘Where do I show up?'"

The show paid Paige $2,500 a week when it debuted Nov. 4, 2002. Paige had his doubts on about how it would last, but the show is still going strong. Paige has appeared on the show more than anyone (over 3,000 episodes) and won more times (over 670). He is known for showing a blackboard on television on which he has scrawled witty phrases.

In 2004, Paige took two years off from column writing to move to New York to appear on “Around the Horn” and various other shows, including “Cold Pizza,’’ which has long since been canceled. Gil Whiteley, a longtime Denver radio broadcaster and one of Paige’s closest friends, recalls visiting him a few times there.

“People would go crazy when he would walk down the street in New York,’’ said Whiteley, now with Mile High Sports. “They’d scream, ‘Hey, Woody.’ … But Woody is actually a shy guy when you meet him in person. He’s not the guy he plays on TV.”

Kiszla said Paige is “like Norm from ‘Cheers'" and that "he can’t walk into any sports bar in America without somebody shouting, ‘Woody.’’’

Paige recalls once going into the New England locker room after a playoff game and the Patriots’ “five starting offensive linemen walked over to me and said, ‘You’re our favorite guy on TV.'"

“This is a whole new world for me,’’ Paige said about gaining fame on television in the latter part of his media career. “I’ll hear from people, ‘We love you on TV.’ But I would just say you can’t go to bed thinking about that. I would be a miserable person if I did that. … I’m just trying to have fun on TV. I’m trying to bring a sense of humor that maybe sports isn’t too serious, and I’m kind of funny and I have a blackboard.”

Against this backdrop of having achieved national fame, Paige revealed in a 2010 column after the suicide of McKinley that he had planned to commit suicide before the Broncos played at San Francisco on Sept. 15, 2002. Paige, who had been taking prescription drugs to combat deep depression, said he planned to drink heavily in Napa before going to drown himself in the Pacific Ocean.

“I had gone to a psychiatrist and was given every drug in the whole world,’’ Paige said. “I was within hours of getting on the plane to go to Napa, and I had it all figured out.

In the column, Paige wrote that Whiteley, whom he called a “brother to me,” showed up at his door and learned what he was thinking. He wrote that Whiteley got Paige’s doctor, Allen Schreiber, on the phone.

Whiteley took Paige to Rose Hospital. He remained there for three weeks while doctors took away his belt, his nail clippers and anything he might be able to use to harm himself. Doctors eventually diagnosed that Paige was diabetic, which had contributed to his depression, and he was on the road to recovery.

“It must have been some calling for me to write that column. It saved a lot of lives,’’ said Paige, who received what has been estimated as 35,000 emails and voicemails about the column, some from people who had contemplated suicide. “(Helping others with that column is) something in my life I am very proud of.”

Paige calls it the “most important” column he has written and said Schreiber will be at Wednesday’s banquet. Whiteley, who also will attend, said he didn’t know beforehand that Paige would be writing that column and that he never has spoken to Paige about the 2002 incident since, even though the two have remained close.

“It changed his life completely around,’’ Whiteley said of Paige getting the help he needed. “I’m very proud of that.”

Paige said he doing quite well these days. He left The Denver Post in 2016 because he didn’t like the direction the paper was going under new management. He said his tenure at The Gazette and The Denver Gazette has “been great,” because “they care about journalism, and that’s the truth.”

“I have no problems,’’ Paige said. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I’ve lost 60 pounds. I’m in the gym every day. I’m the healthiest I have been in my life. I’m the happiest I’ve been in my life. I’m not sitting here thinking of retiring. I’m enjoying every day.”

And Paige on Wednesday will stand at a podium and talk about his 70 years as a writer, including 50 since he showed up in Colorado in 1974.

“My dad, if he were here, would say, ‘Son, you did OK,’’’ he said.