Illinois’ basketball team has a home game Tuesday, which means, among many other things, that Loren Tate rolled out of bed in the morning with a pretty good idea of where he’d be at night.
Courtside. Same place the venerable columnist and radio host has been since he started covering his alma mater for the Champaign News-Gazette in 1966.
“It’s a long, old story,” he said, “and I think the only reason you’re [telling] it is because I’ve lived to be 91. Look, I had no control over that. It’s just luck.”
Just luck, is it?
Sure, we can go with that. I’m not about to argue with the dean of college scribes here or anywhere.
By God, though, what a career. What a sports and journalism life.
Tate got his start in the business as a teenager in Monticello — about 20 miles west of Champaign — working summers at the Piatt County Republican, a weekly paper run by his stepfather, Darrell Tippett. “Tip” hoped the boy would come back home and take the reins after going off to study journalism at Illinois, but that didn’t happen.
A 6-1 guard and a good third baseman and pitcher, Tate played basketball and baseball at Illinois and flashed all the tools; that is, if you count scribbling notes, typing and sniffing out good stories. He calls himself a “walk-on when they didn’t even have walk-ons,” a stellar line from a writer full of them.
After school, he spent two years in the Army at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, playing while there in a basketball league with some big-name athletes: Cliff Hagan, Richie Guerin, Dick Groat. Eventually, Tate returned to the Republican for a spell before landing a job as a sports writer in Hammond., Indiana, moving up in the world from $75 a week to $100. He’d stick around in Hammond for 11 years, becoming the sports editor along the way.
A beautiful day came in ’66 when Tate wrote columns for two different Sunday papers, one a goodbye to Hammond and the other a hello to Champaign. At that, he truly was — though he couldn’t have known it at the time — home forever.
Understand: This is a man who was 13 years older than Jim Grabowski, 11 years older than Dick Butkus and five years older than Ray Nitschke, Illini football legends all. He was a year older than Johnny “Red” Kerr, the Illini basketball star who went on to broadcast Bulls games throughout the Jordan championship years.
Late, great basketball coach Lou Henson was 43 when he got to Illinois in 1975. There to cover the first day of Henson’s time at the school, and every one after that, was Tate, who happened to be two months older. To say they became friends is an understatement. Henson died in 2020 at 88.
“Another old friend gone,” Tate said.
There has been too much of that. To Tate’s knowledge, only one other male student from his high school graduating class is still alive.
“All my buddies and the members of the teams I played on back in those days — all gone,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. I’m here on borrowed time.”
While we talked, he studied a photo of Illinois’ 1951-52 basketball squad — a national semifinalist for the second season in a row — and counted by name those who’ve died.
“It just makes you sick,” he said.
Most of us can only imagine.
“But that’s the way it is,” he said. “You just kind of accept it and go on.”
But that’s the beauty of this man, how he goes on and on.
His father, John Loren Tate, who died of tuberculosis when Tate was a 6-year-old in Kentucky, surely would have been proud and probably amazed. Tate’s mother, Gaynell, was sick back then, too, and had to send him to Hoopeston, Illinois, to live with his grandparents. But she recovered, moved to Illinois and met “Tip,” eventually relocated to Champaign later in life and died at 86, having been able to witness her only son’s heyday up close.
Tate has been writing his “Tatelines” column for 57 years. For a long stretch, he was essentially the News-Gazette’s sports editor, columnist and Illini beat writer all at the same time, if that’s possible, but that wasn’t nearly all. For more than a decade, he also was a television sports anchor in Champaign. For 30 years or so, he was in the radio booth at Illini games as a color man. He has hosted countless football and basketball radio pregame and postgame shows and, every week since 1979, the “Saturday Sports Talk” show on WDWS, or 1400-AM on locals’ dials.
He writes only once a week now, but he’s still on the radio five days a week and, of course, still a fixture at all the press conferences and home games.
“Radio is a lot easier on an old guy,” he said.
Easy, is it?
Sure, we can go with that.
Tate married Ilene when he was 19, and they had three daughters. He married Lex 40 years ago, and they had a son. Could Lex be any better? She worked at the paper and still teaches journalism at Illinois — in other words, a resounding no.
There are many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, near and far. There are so many memories, a lot of them delightful. There are clever lines and deadlines still to be written and met.
The News-Gazette wasn’t kidding when it celebrated Tate, calling him “indefatigable.” But that was in 2011, when he turned 80.
Seriously, all this time later?
In a word: How?
“The answer is that I’m not pushing myself,” he said. “This is the way I live. I don’t want to do nothing. I could sit here today in my condo and do nothing, but that’s not for me. That’s no fun at all.”
