Sharp, a Detroit native who graduated from Detroit Catholic Central in 1978 and the University of Michigan in 1982, joined the Free Press in 1983. Initially, he had covered high school, college and pro beats. He formerly was the beat writer for Michigan State and the Detroit Pistons.
"Drew's life was the Free Press," his wife, Karen, said today. "He loved the people there. He loved his job more than anything. He always considered himself very lucky to have such a good career."
In January 1999, at the age of 38, Sharp was promoted to a full-time columnist to replace the retiring Charlie Vincent.
Drew Sharp became a journalist when he was 6 years old. That’s when he lay in the intensive-care unit at Children’s Hospital in Detroit while recovering from open-heart surgery. He watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS “Evening News” and fell in love with journalism.
Sharp’s father, Calvin, bought him a typewriter and made him a microphone out of a cardboard spool from a roll of paper towels and watched his son recuperate by writing stories for his evening report at the dinner table.
“Love is like a perfectly fluid golf swing. You don’t find it so much as it finds you, and you have to be ready to take advantage,” Sharp wrote in the introduction to his 2003 Detroit Free Press book, “Razor Sharp.”
Cronkite and that cardboard spool microphone launched a journalism career that lasted more than 30 years for Sharp, whose acerbic wit and relentlessly tough criticism as a Free Press columnist since 1999 turned him into one of the most recognizable fixtures in the Detroit sports media landscape.
Sharp, who began his career at the Free Press in 1983 and never worked for another newspaper, died Friday morning at his home in Bloomfield Hills. He was 56. An autopsy performed by the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s office determined that Sharp died of hypertensive cardiovascular disease. He was pronounced dead at 7:07 a.m.
"Drew's life was the Free Press," said his wife, Karen. "He loved the people there. He loved his job more than anything. He always considered himself very lucky to have such a good career."
Free Press executive editor Robert Huschka said: "Drew Sharp loved writing about our beloved Detroit sports. He was a powerful voice, with big opinions. He was a longtime member of the Free Press family -- and he will be greatly missed."
Sharp, who had two open-heart surgeries before he was 8, was a Detroit native and graduated from Detroit Catholic Central High in 1978. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1982, although he jokingly claimed in his self-written Freep.com biography that U-M wouldn’t claim him as an alumnus for his “repeated infidelities in not signing off with ‘Go Blue’ following every Michigan column.”
Sharp joined the Free Press the year after graduating from college and moved up the ranks. He earned promotions to covering the Detroit Pistons and Michigan State before taking over in 1999 for retiring columnist Charlie Vincent.
“A columnist's role isn't to blindly lead cheers,” Sharp wrote upon being named columnist. “Nor is it a blank check to slam individuals solely because you have been given a club. But there is a responsibility to raise questions and express doubts. There should be a commitment to deflate the smug and arrogant because, after all, this is only sports -- a useful diversion and an increasingly influential business, but hardly irreplaceable in our everyday lives.
“A columnist hopes readers come away with a better understanding of what motivates his vision of sports today. He hopes they understand that the objective is to stir their emotions, make them laugh, cry, shout or swear, but most important, make them think.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment