Jon Pessah

Former newspaper sports journalist Jon Pessah spent seven years talking to some of the biggest names in baseball.

Those seven years demanded many sacrifices. The Smithtown resident had been teaching sports journalism at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism, for two semesters, a job he had loved. But Pessah had to give up teaching to concentrate on the book.

“I probably learned more from the students than they learned from me,” Pessah said. “The students energized me. I still talk to about half a dozen of my former students.”

Pessah has spent much of his life on Long Island, from the time his parents left Brooklyn for East Meadow to the time he spent as Newsday’s sports editor.

As a kid, Pessah said, he went to Jones Beach and played ball endlessly. It was a time when Entenmann’s delivered cakes and the milkman brought ice-cold milk to the back stoop.

“I can remember sitting on my front stoop waiting for the paper to be delivered,” Pessah said. “I was a fanatical sports fan, and I loved to read.” He loved to read so much that he had read every sports book in East Meadow Library by the time he graduated from East Meadow High School in 1970.

After graduation, he went on to the University of Maryland’s engineering school.

But five weeks of unpleasant math classes led Pessah to switch to the school of business. But business wasn’t his calling, either. He lasted for two semesters in the business school.

Deciding that he loved to write, he started taking classes at the school of journalism. But he never told his parents in fear that they wouldn’t let him keep going to school. This was where his journalism journey began.

In his junior and senior years of college, Pessah wrote for the University of Maryland’s student newspaper, the Diamondback. “I remember working at my desk when this young man came in and introduced himself to me,” said his lifelong friend, colleague and brother-in-law, Phil Jacobs. “He said that he wanted to be a sports writer.”

After graduation, Pessah applied to the Washington Star and the Washington Post. But neither was hiring someone straight out of school.

He found a job working for the civil service. After five weeks of working there, he saw an ad for a woman’s page editor at a small Virginia paper, The Journal Messenger.

“I thought, well, if they’re looking for a woman’s page editor, maybe they’re looking for a sportswriter, too,” Pessah said. “As fate would have it, the sports editor left to go to another job.”

The Journal Messenger was a small paper. Pessah covered sports from horseshoe tournaments to car racing, but he wasn’t making much money. “I used to take rolls out of the press room and stuff them into my pocket so that I had some food to eat,” Pessah said.

A year and a half later, he went on to a larger paper in New Jersey, and soon he landed a job at the Washington Star as a copy editor.

Pessah did not think he would love copy editing like he loved to write, but once he started on the copy desk, he fell in love with the job. Pessah was a copy editor for a while and then moved his way up to the layout editor, which was the fast track to management, he said. But in 1981 the Washington Star folded, and Pessah was out of a job. He now had a wife and a house payment to worry about.

He next worked for Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant. After three months, he became deputy sports editor, and a year after that, he became the sports editor, a job he held for seven years.

At the Courant, Pessah was part of a group that produced a package of stories about the discrimination against African-Americans in baseball. The project was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

“He was my first real mentor,” said Jim Jenks, who was Pessah’s assistant at Hartford and deputy at Newsday. “He took an active part in my career. He really figuratively threw his arm on my shoulder.”

“The sports editor that replaced Jon at the Hartford Courant is still there 26 years later,” Jenks added. “That shows you what kind of grooming Jon did with his people.”

Newsday, which at the time was owned by the same parent company as the Courant, offered Pessah a job as Assistant Managing Editor in 1991. Pessah told his wife, Suzi, that he didn’t want to take the job.

“I didn’t want to take the job because I had worked around the clock for eight years,” he said. “I took a sports staff that no one had heard of, that had no national profile, and made it one of the top 10 sports sections in the country. At that point, I could pick and chose what I wanted to do.”

But he changed his mind and took the job with Newsday.

On July 14, 1995, the parent company of Newsday, The Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Co., announced that it was closing the paper’s New York edition. That same night, a colleague from his days at the Washington Star offered Pessah a job on the development staff for a weekly sports magazine.

Pessah took a buyout and left the newspaper world after 20 years.

“At 41 years old, I took a leap of faith with a wife, two kids and a Long Island mortgage,” Pessah said.

This project turned out to be ESPN The Magazine.

“I had a lot of faith in him and those four letters,” Pessah said.

It took four years before Pessah and his colleagues finally turned in a prototype of the magazine to Disney, which by then owned ESPN. Pessah was the NBA editor at the magazine for about six years and then ran its enterprise investigative team for three years. He left because his new editor was more interested in 800-word stories than long investigative pieces, and Pessah became more interested in writing books, he said.

After many false starts, Pessah received a contract for his first book, “The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Brokers.”

“This book was its own incredible learning experience,” Pessah said. “It is much of an issue-orientated book about the last 20 years of baseball and the brutal labor negotiations.”

The interviews were difficult, he said.

“I was going against people who were high powered and really famous,” Pessah said. “They were not happy with the questions I was asking.”

After seven years’ work, “The Game” was published by Little, Brown and Co. on May 5, 2015.

“Jon sets a very high bar for himself,” said Jacobs, his brother-in-law. “He will not only go the extra mile, he will go the extra thousand miles to get a question answered.”

“He’s the real deal.”

Pessah’s next book is a biography of Yogi Berra. “I just wanted to do something that I thought would be fun and on someone that I greatly admire,” Pessah said. “I don’t think enough has been written about Yogi.”

Despite his success, Pessah is modest. The way he describes it, his success is more a result of hard work than natural talent.

“I knew I wasn’t Michael Jordan,” Pessah said. “To get where I wanted to go, I was going to have to work exceptionally hard and to outwork people. That was a big part of the success I’ve had.”