John Shipley: Gene McGivern, a St. Thomas athletics mainstay, says goodbye
As he neared his last day of work as University of St. Thomas sports information director, Gene McGivern had one of those moments of clarity that seems obvious but typically escapes us a life happens.
“I did a lot of things, and I met a lot of people,” McGivern said Monday, the day before he was set to finish a 27-year run as the Tommies athletics department’s Sports Information Director.
An awful lot has happened at St. Thomas in that time, and in terms of the sports department’s narrative, it was, for McGivern, backended as the Tommies moved quickly from NCAA Division III athletics in the conference it helped found in 1920 to Division I athletics in four different conferences.
As McGivern, 65, noted, “I didn’t get that soft landing toward retirement.”
But it worked for McGivern, who has always been busy and always enjoyed being in the middle of it, whether he was running cross country at Iowa State, working for small newspapers, coaching distance runners at Augsburg or co-writing Dennis Green’s autobiography “No Room for Crybabies.”
It’s been an interesting run.
An all-state runner at Assumption High School in Davenport, Iowa — he was the state champion as a senior — McGivern was recruited by Iowa State and became a member of the Cyclones team that finished 10th at NCAA nationals in 1980. He finished seventh in the Big 8 Conference meet that year.
Those are serious achievements, but McGivern said Monday, “I was never a guy who was going to run in the Olympics. I was a guy who had to grind and overachieve. It’s never been lost on me that over my newspaper or SID career, I see the athlete who’s maybe a late bloomer, or someone who’s had to grind for everything they got, and find it hard not to embrace that story.”
There have been other stories, too.
As a stringer for the Associated Press in 1993, McGivern covered a lot of games in a mostly forgotten Twins season, but one of them was a 22-inning, 5-4 victory over Cleveland that was the longest — 6 hours, 17 minutes — in team history (it’s now third on the list). In 1994, McGivern was covering a mid-winter Gophers men’s basketball game momentarily given life when Northwestern’s coach, the late Ricky Byrdsong, left the bench to sit in the stands.
More notable, and maybe more unlikely, was an offer to help then-Vikings head coach Dennis Green write his autobiography in 1997. That experience, McGiverm said, was “an eye-opener.”
“(Green) wasn’t sure if he was going to get over the hump here,” McGivern said. “This was when the Vikings had several co-owners, and some of them were trying to get Lou Holtz to come back here. He wanted a book that said, ‘Here’s who I am.’
“This is when (Green) was battling with reporters every day in press conferences, and he wanted to say, ‘Here’s a different opinion of who I am.’ ”
Green had about eight chapters finished but “needed a lot of help to clean it up. But he had a story to tell and he was really motivated. We worked together on that, stayed up till 2 a.m. a lot of nights.”
Although something of a rush job, the book made its points, one of which was the difficult path Black coaches face in becoming head coaches in the NFL — which really hasn’t changed. McGivern had written a biography about former Michigan and Iowa State coach Johnny Orr, but Green was an entirely different kind of man.
“In some respects, I look back and think I could have done so much better with a little more experience,” McGivern said. “It was a complicated book, and as the writer I was caught in the middle of his goals and keeping the book on track as an account of his life.”
McGivern looks back and feels the book would have been better if Green had been willing to open up more, but there was never enough time to develop the proper trust between subject and writer. It’s a lesson McGivern never forgot.
“As a PR person, you realize that you gain more friends when you open up and are honest,” he said. “We’re a forgiving society. We like swagger, but we like it more when people are authentic and unafraid to open up.”
When he moved to the Twin Cities, McGivern was interested in working for one of the metro’s two big newspapers, the Pioneer Press or Star Tribune, but he is happy it didn’t work out that way.
“I didn’t have some of the same concerns that have enveloped the newspaper industry — budgets and fundraising, stuff like that,” he said. “I just had one job, and that was storytelling and helping promote the University of St. Thomas.
“Now everyone has a word for it, ‘branding.’ This was before they called it that. My job was to put the university and coaches and student-athletes in the best light and talk about their accomplishments to show how at St. Thomas, athletics are a part of the entire mission.”
And it does feel as if the Tommies might have been McGivern’s destiny. His wife, Barb, grew up a mile from him in Davenport, but they didn’t meet until he moved to the Twin Cities in 1989 — where Barb had attended St. Thomas. McGivern’s brother attended St. Thomas. So did children Peter and Bridget, and George, the youngest, is matriculating there this fall.
For some of us, it will be odd not to have him there. When he was hired, McGivern was No. 30 on the athletics department seniority list. On Tuesday, he will will leave as No. 2 in a department that just doesn’t have a lot of turnover. Four people will now do the job he once did by himself.
“A lot of emotions,” McGivern said.
Regret is not one of them.
