Among the dozens of tributes that came pouring in after the news that long-time Arkansas Democrat-Gazette University of Arkansas beat writer Bob Holt passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday was this jewel from Nolan Richardson, the Hall of Fame former Razorbacks basketball coach.
“Bob was a very clever guy,” Richardson told the Democrat-Gazette. “I always put him in the category of a Columbo-type guy. He had all the answers, but he asked them anyway just to find out if you knew the answers. And if you didn’t, and you were close, he’d figure out a way to get you to say something that he might have wanted you to say but you didn’t. … That’s why he had to keep asking different ways, to get that quote to come out right.
“I thought he was the cleverest of all the reporters I was around in all my years, and that’s including the ones in New York, it didn’t matter where.”
For those too young to catch the pop culture reference or who didn’t have the pleasure of knowing Bob, I asked Mark Dawidziak, author of The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, to explain what Richardson might have meant when he compared Holt to Columbo. “With Columbo, it was all about concealing just how shrewd, observant and downright brilliant he was,” Dawidziak told me. “He always notices the one clue everyone else missed. And then he gets to the solution through a combination of skill and good old-fashioned hard work. He’s a study in dedication and determination.”
The way Richardson sees it, there isn’t much difference between a crafty detective and a crafty sportswriter.
Those of us who covered the Southeastern Conference beat couldn’t help but get to know Bob and like him, too. He always sat in the front row of press conferences and in his nasal, monotone voice, asked seemingly esoteric questions. Sometimes they were tough questions, the kind no one else had the guts to ask. Bob also had a knack for tossing out icebreakers, like the time at an SEC football media day when he asked Darth Vader himself, then-Alabama coach Nick Saban, if he could control the weather because it had been raining until Saban walked in the building. That got a laugh from Saban, never one to suffer fools. Bob had a sneaky sense of humor, and maybe that day he was just trying to lighten Saban up a bit.
Whatever Holt asked, or however he asked it, he was always on point.
“He always had an Arkansas angle in his questions,” says Mike Strange, who covered University of Tennessee athletics for the Knoxville News-Sentinel and first met Holt in Oregon at the 1991 NCAA championship track meet, one year before Arkansas joined the SEC. Strange called that his “preview to the Bob experience.” He quickly learned Holt had a narrow-minded focus when it came to working his beat.
“He could land at the Kremlin and be face-to-face with Vladimir Putin and ask him an Arkansas question,” Strange says. “He was always on message with Arkansas. He was just so nice. He asked those questions, but I don’t remember anybody ever getting mad at him. He was kind. He had no ego. I loved the way the coaches all knew who he was.”
Neil McReady edits an Ole Miss website for the Rivals network, RebelGrove.com. Before that, he covered Auburn, which is how he first crossed paths with Holt. Like many of us, McReady learned a thing or two just by watching Holt do his job.
“He was the very best at localizing,” McReady says. “It’s such an old school thing, but he was great at it. If somebody was from Arkansas or played at Arkansas or had any Arkansas connection, he was on top of it. He could be covering a game between Florida and Georgia and if there was a kid that had any connection to Arkansas, he’d include that. I don’t mean this as a criticism, but some of the younger [media] people would ask me, ‘He’s talking to [Ole Miss football coach] Lane Kiffin and he’s asking all these Arkansas questions. What’s he doing?’ He was writing for an audience that consumes his product. That’s what he was doing.”
McCready’s two daughters wound up attending the University of Arkansas, and Holt never failed to ask about them. “Not only would he mention the girls, he’d mention them by name,” McCready says. “He didn’t have to. But they mattered to him because Arkansas had become their adopted home, just like it had become his.”
Holt attended the University of Missouri, yet another distinguished alumnus of a journalism school that churns out successful professionals and Hall of Famers. In a tragic coincidence, the last sporting event he covered was at Mizzou. Last Saturday, as he was ascending the steps to the football press box, he had to stop. He told people he was out of breath. But he covered the game and attended his final press conference, asking questions as always, doing the job he’d performed so well since 1981. On the last trip he would make back to a press box, Holt collapsed and was rushed to a Columbia, Missouri hospital. In another coincidence, the attending physician there played baseball at Arkansas — precisely the kind of angle from which Bob could have spun a great story.
“That one kind of got to me,” McReady says. “It was as though God was giving Bob the proper escort home.”
Bob’s death hit me hard. He was a long-time contributor to my Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook and last August, after he filed his lengthy Arkansas preview, he sent me an email. At 65, Bob thought he was getting too old to do justice to the book. He told me he was happy to find a younger replacement he thought could do a better job.
I was disappointed but respected his wishes. And I left him with this: “My friend, you might find someone who can do the job, but you’ll never find someone who can do it better than you.”
