Former T&G columnist Timothy Connolly dies at 68

On March 9, Timothy J. Connolly was channel surfing and came across one of his favorite movies, “The Pride of the Yankees,” starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig.

Despite seeing the film many times in his lifetime and knowing the film’s historic speech by heart, Connolly was compelled to stop. For this would be the first time watching this classic film, this classic story, since being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease (or ALS). Usually moved to tears prior to his diagnosis, the sentiment of Gehrig’s speech came home to Connolly and he felt connected to Cooper playing Gehrig.

“Still a great movie,” Connolly mused on a posting on his personal Facebook page. “At the end, he tells a sold-out Yankee Stadium that despite his fatal disease, he considered himself ““the luckiest man on the face of the earth!” I can’t go that far, but I’m certainly lucky and blessed to have so many caring relatives and friends in my life.”

Connolly ended the post with the words, “Love to all” followed by a heart emoji.

Connolly, a basketball star in his native Pittsfield who made Worcester his second hometown, died May 3 after a courageous battle with ALS.

Obituary: Timothy J. Connolly

With the news of his passing, many hearts were broken.

Connolly, 68, leaves his wife of 43 years, Donna; two sons, Shaun and Mark; and a grandson, Davin Moses Connolly.

"My dad was the greatest. My hero and my best friend. He was so smart and the best storyteller I ever came across. No one could shoot a basketball like him. He was larger than life and the sweetest guy. He could roast you while making you laugh and knew how to fix any situation. I’m going to miss him," Shaun Connolly posted on Facebook.

Connolly spent much of his professional career as a reporter and columnist for the Telegram & Gazette. He spent six years as a spokesman for the state Department of Revenue before finishing his career with the Worcester County District Attorney Office, where he spent 14 years.

His ties to Worcester are traced to his years at Assumption University, then Assumption College, from where he graduated in 1977. He later taught news writing at Assumption and Clark University.

His newspaper career exposed him to a range of topics, from crime to politics. He was a respected figure in the newsroom, a go-to colleague for reporters in need of feedback or a fact.

“I learned how to read before going to school by reading newspapers at home,” Connolly said in an interview with Clark in 2021. “My family was a newspaper-reading family.”

When it comes to former colleagues, William T. Clew probably knew Connolly the longest and admired him even longer.

“The world is poorer because Tim Connolly’s not here,” Clew said. “He’s a guy I will miss for a long, long time. He was a good friend, my good friend, and I will miss him.”

Clew, 93, worked 37 years as a reporter and editor at the Telegram & Gazette, overlapping with Connolly. After retiring from the T&G, Clew worked close to 30 years as the contributing editor at the Catholic Free Press.

“Tim was a good, solid reporter and a good writer and one of the nicest, generous people I’ve ever known in my life,” Clew said. “He was a real pro.”

Clew said Connolly started at The Evening Gazette in one of its now defunct regional news offices covering breaking news and was moved into the main office in Worcester.

“He went into sports and did well there and then was moved back to news and did very well there,” Clew said. “He could do the job. If you could do the job, you can do anything in it and you do it well. And that’s the way he was. He did it very well. He cared about it. He had a very good sense of ethics. And he was just a good, solid newspaper man, good writer. He knew how to be brief. He get in the whole story with not more words than he needed to use.”

In his native Pittsfield, Connolly was a member of the St. Joseph High School Class of 1973. He was proud of his alma mater, having left his mark by exclipsing 1,000 career points on the basketball court.

Not only would Clew and Connolly regularly see each other for lunch, the two often played hoop together.

“Tim was a terrific basketball player and I played basketball. And we would have these pickup games. And he would always get me involved,” Clew recalled. “God, I’m a quarter of a century older than he is and a terrible basketball player and he would let me play. But, much more than that, he was a very dear friend and that spoke to him. I’m an old man and he was very, very nice to me.”

Clew recounted how Connolly was a real basketball star in his youth and shared a colorful story about Connolly from another former sportswriter.

“Tim set records that nobody broke until they had the three-point line,” Clew said. “(Gazette sportswriter) Bill Doyle said to the Assumption coach because he was on that squad, ‘You should have played Tim Connolly more.’ And the coach said, ‘You know, you’re probably right.’ And Doyle said, ‘If they had the three-point line then, you would have played him a lot more.’ And the coach said, 'I wouldn’t have played him at all because he would have been at Notre Dame.’”

Clew also praised Connolly for his kindness toward others.

“Tim was a good-natured guy willing to give anybody a helping hand and did,” Clew said. “He was about as nice a guy, as thoughtful and as generous and about as a capable a guy as I know. He was very good.”

Clew also said Connolly was usually very quiet and never tooted his own horn.

Since he was a kid, Connolly idolized Wilt Chamberlain. In October 1991, Connolly not only met his childhood idol and talked to him in great lengths but the NBA legend complimented Connolly’s reporting skills and basketball knowledge with the comment, “You play older than you look.”

Even though ALS was noticeably ravaging his body, Connolly kept his spirits up and the spirits of others.

“Tim was very gracious and heroic, in a sense, in the way he handled it so well,” Clew said. “He would laugh on jokes, on occasion, and tell stories. He went to a (Boston) Red Sox game recently and said, ‘That’s one of the benefits of having ALS.'”

His column, Politically Speaking, gave readers a unique view of the local and national scene. Connolly delivered his observations in print much the same way he delivered them in person, with a relaxed, check-this-out tone.

He enjoyed recounting the time President Clinton complimented his necktie.

"It's a 'Save the Children' design,'' he told the president, who was on a campaign stop in Massachusetts in 1996.

Clinton then praised the nonprofit group.

Later, someone asked Connolly if he gave Clinton his tie; perhaps the president would have offered his own tie. Connolly, in his column, explained that such a deal was off the table because his tie was a Father's Day gift from his sons.

After some second-guessing over whether he had lost an opportunity to claim the tie of a U.S. president, Connolly came to his senses.

He recounted a friend's take: "You would have had the tie of some guy from Mississippi whom he traded with the day before.''

On Oct. 7, 2000, Connolly's 359th column of Politically Speaking was published. It was his last.

The column ended with the following:

"Because I had my picture in the paper every week, some people considered me a minor celebrity. But whenever I started to get a swelled head, I would run into an old friend who would inevitably ask,`Are you still with the paper?'

"To those of you reading the column for the first time, I wish I could have reached you sooner. To the occasional reader, thank you. And to the faithful readers who have told me they eat breakfast with me every Saturday, you'll have to invite me over sometime."

Despite being gone from the grindstone of newspapers for over two decades and holding two steady public relationships jobs since leaving the paper, Tim Connolly’s name will always be synonymous with journalism at its best among his former colleagues, his peers and those he wrote about, interviewed and covered.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Former T&G columnist Timothy Connolly dies at 68