<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=3MTHzH_1DQLiudG00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3MTHzH_1DQLiudG00" width="1200" height="630" >Jul. 16—The world got a little less colorful last week.Bob Barrows, who was a Lewiston Tribune sports writer from 1972 to 2003, a superfan of Bay Area teams and a connoisseur of dark chocolate and peanuts, died July 7 at Cottonwood, Ariz. He was 92.Longtime readers of the Tribune probably remember seeing Barrows' byline in our sports section for years. And generations of Trib sports staffers — I among them — worked with, learned from and were amused by Bob for decades.Barrows was a sports writer from the old school. Every Bob story had the score of the game in the first few sentences and both teams' win-loss record not long after that. Statistics were plentiful. Clever phrasing was common. And sports for sports' sake was always enough — he rarely felt the need to invoke the world at large when writing about games and athletes.But honestly, as a young sports writer who was sometimes a little too impressed by his own work, I thought Bob's writing was a bit cheesy. He had a litany of phrases — eye-popping, lidlifter, doubledip, ducat, two-bagger, magic lantern (a reference to television) — that seemed hackneyed. And he often crammed details into unusual spots, kind of like the second sentence of this column.But I've come to appreciate Bob's craft. His phrases were crisp and crackling. His mashed-in details were memorable. And, hey, looking back on his stories in our archives, there was an undeniable flow to his writing.Newspaper sports writers are almost exclusively young. They work nights and weekends — and almost everyone who does the job eventually gets burned out by that schedule and moves to a different spot at the newspaper, or a different career altogether.Bob Barrows might be the only person who has ever retired as a Tribune sports writer, as he did after the 2003 NAIA World Series. You could even say his sports writing career lasted 77 years: His first byline appeared in the San Carlos, Calif., newspaper in 1948 when he was 14, and his last was a guest column in the Tribune in March 2025.One reason Bob lasted so long was that he never got sick of sports. Bob had his teams — the ones who played in his native Oakland or represented his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley — and he followed them religiously. On busy Saturdays, as we sat in the Trib office taking phoned-in high school results, Bob would sometimes answer his phone like this:"Sports, Bob — don't tell me the Cal score! I'm taping the game at home!"There are a million stories like that about Bob. Here's a sample: He served for years as a baseball and softball umpire, and even reported on some games he umped; he wrote an annual April Fool's Day column under the name "Sloof Lirpa" until he wrote about a bumbling airline he made up, which turned out to be a real airline that threatened to sue the newspaper; he covered the first Super Bowl in 1967, the Bay Area World Series in 1989 and whatever got thrown his way at the Trib; he often bragged about dancing with actress Betty Grable in Las Vegas in 1968; he had an enigmatic nickname that nevertheless seemed fitting — the Blazer.Bob even had a life outside of sports and newspapering. He met his future wife, Sue, in Austria in 1955, and they went on to have four children. Bob was also a devout Jehovah's Witness, and often went out "banging on doors," as he called it, to share his church's message with strangers.Bob and Sue moved from Lewiston to Arizona last summer to live with one of their daughters, Rommy Cole. I visited Bob a few times before the move, and he was the guest of honor at a lunch with several of his former Trib Sports co-workers. We all enjoyed one last visit with Bob.But that wasn't the last time Bob and I communicated. This past fall, Bob often called me to make sure his picks in Trib's weekly football forecast had arrived.To the very end, he loved sports.Baney is the managing editor of the Lewiston Tribune and Moscow-Pullman Daily News. He worked for the Tribune's sports department from 1997 to 2019. He may be contacted at mbaney@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2251. Follow him on X @MattBaney_Trib.</div></body>

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Jul. 16—The world got a little less colorful last week. Bob Barrows, who was a Lewiston Tribune sports writer from 1972 to 2003, a superfan of Bay Area teams and a connoisseur of dark chocolate and peanuts, died July 7 at Cottonwood, Ariz. He was 92. Longtime readers of...

UP FRONT/COMMENTARY: Remembering Bob Barrows, forever a sports writer

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Jul. 16—The world got a little less colorful last week. Bob Barrows, who was a Lewiston Tribune sports writer from 1972 to 2003, a superfan of Bay Area tea

UP FRONT/COMMENTARY: Remembering Bob Barrows, forever a sports writer

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