Guru Remembrance of Former Inquirer Sports Editor Jay Searcy Who Died Saturday in Tennessee

By Mel Greenberg @womhoops guru

Sadly, in a year in which several media notables in the sports world passed away, apparently 2018 wasn’t going to get out of dodge without claiming one more before handing over the business of responsibility for everything on the planet to 2019 at the stroke of midnight.

Word came Sunday morning from a colleague in Knoxville, Tenn., where former Inquirer Sports Editor Jay Searcy had been retired quite a while that he passed away Saturday at age 84 and an obituary had been posted online in the local paper.

Those of you following the history of how the Guru came to be the Guru know it was Jay’s idea upon arrival here in Philadelphia that perhaps it would be great to start a weekly women’s basketball poll.

Anyhow, the news of Jay’s passing was learned at a time in the late morning when the Inquirer on a Sunday is still operating on the dark side of the moon, so to speak, in having staff and mechanisms in place to immediate handle breaking news. 

And this week was extra tough because many of Jay’s contemporaries were scattered covering bowl games or deeply entrenched in the most important weekend of the season in terms of the fate of the defending Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles.

However, the wheels of coverage to give Jay his due eventually got rolling and those of us who knew Jay best were asked to send whatever to someone in the office who would assemble the contributions into a narrative which has since been posted. 

Pieces of the Guru’s contribution appear but since our world was made possible by Jay’s insistance to have your Guru take a path to make him the Guru this is what originated from here which I now share with you.

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Mel Greenberg remembrance

After the staff was made aware of Jay Searcy’s hire as sports editor of The Inquirer, other than the reporting core of the department being told they were getting “a writer’s editor” coming from the copy desk of The New York Times, no one had any idea of how different of the change in style from management would be.

The previous editor Tim Kelly, extremely talented, well organized, and eventually to become publisher of the Lexington Herald Leader in Kentucky, had been aloof from the troops in the department because of the young age of 25 at the time of his promotion. But he also had the respect of the entire staff.

Jay arrived with a bundle of energy, vision and ideas and quickly sought to be one of the boys, many nights hanging with our crew at the Pen and Pencil Club in center city and I recall one night at a local hotel where he joined in a round of cards.

He often attended parties of the entire and youthful newsroom staff under the legendary Gene Roberts, even once coming with his wife Jackie in optional disguise at a halloween party hosted by a reporter’s wife involved in the fashion industry.

Don McKee, then the principal high school writer, and myself were the first to be exposed to Jay after he landed, since he wanted to come along to our coverage of the city high school football championship, which was occurring the next day at old Veterans Stadium..

Through the entire afternoon besides helping to work on our copy, Jay kept running by us a zillion concepts, many of which though receptive we weren’t exactly the level needed to be a sounding board of approval.

Given his Tennessee roots I considered him a genteel Southerner in Yankee clothing.

But of course it didn’t take long for Jay to make a move when he came aboard in the mid-1970s to impact my future life because having written a Woman in Sports column in New York he wanted to launch similar coverage here.

This was the hey day of the big rivalry of Immaculata in this area in women’s basketball and Queens College up North.

He wanted to set me up, give me all his files and contacts and  since yours truly having a liberal mind and knowledge that editors were trying to attract more female readers, I was receptive.

But then came the fateful day when he called me back to his office and said, “What do you think of the idea of a Women’s Basketball Poll.”

“I think you’re nuts,” I responded shocking the heck out of him with my remark. “First, there are only four legitimate teams out there capable of winning anything. Second, where are you going to get scores. Where are you going to get information to make it legitimate?”

He quickly came back, playing to an assumed ego I did not possess. “But it would become your poll no matter what it would be called. You will have to teach them how to report scores quickly after games and everything else. You will be the principal guy.”

Whether Jay actually believed what he was selling is a matter of conjecture but for reasons in a story for another day I decided to give it a shot and Jay seemed pleasantly surprised when calls for me started coming to the office from radio, television, and other newspaper organizations around the country.

Running the department was a challenge for him and if you said you were going somewhere and got his approval there were many times he was surprised when you called in from where you had gone to work the story — not just me in this exercise.

Of course Jay was known nationally in part as a president of the Associated Press Sports Editor Association and I could see that when he asked to help host the APSE Convention when it came to Philadelphia during his presidency.

At some point, Jay sought to give up the mantle of boss and so a notice was posted that Jay was going to return to his first love – writing.

He took over the boxing and horse racing beats but did so at a time when typewriters were becoming a thing of the past and Jay was technologically challenged.

Many nights he would call in from Las Vegas with a looming deadline and had to be guided to get his story to arrive in the office.

We became great friends and when he retired to Knoxville, Tenn., he was part of the insiders around the legendary Pat Summitt at the University of Tennessee and often he called me with inside scoops, many of which were not at this end given my own friendship with the women’s legend.

During a trip to Knoxville I had a chance to visit him out in the suburbs where he played golf — the deck in back of his house even overlooked one of the greens of an adjoining course — and owned a small boat he navigated through one of the Tennessee Valley Authority waterways that had been created with the construction of a dam.

He even laughed that day, saying he had to stop at the computer store because of problems with his laptop “some things never change, Mel.”

Of course, the year I got inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007 in Knoxville it was great to have Jay around to be part of the celebration and given him credit for his vision and for planting the seeds.

No question, Jay was an original for those of us who worked for him and alongside him and he will be deeply missed.