Philly Sports Voice Bill Lyon a Broomall Treasure

He’s missed. That familiar sketched face on the side of the page, or in the center above the fold of The Philadelphia Inquirer sports section with his head tilted slightly upward, as if he knew something the rest of us didn’t know. And in most cases, he did. His prose slid off the pages with an avuncular Midwestern decency that somehow has been lost in today’s popular blink-of-an-eye, catch-you sports journalism.

After reading a Bill Lyon column, you couldn’t help but feel a little better about yourself and the world around you. He’s still a treasure, living right here in Broomall for the last 33 years and a fixture in Delaware County since moving to the Philadelphia region in the summer of 1972.

He’s everything a sportswriter should aspire to be, and it’s not because of how or what he knew about sports, but he was and still is capable of reaching inside an athlete or observe a game or occurrence and unearth that rare visceral nugget.

Lyon, 73, is a grandfather now and still very active. He does a handful of speaking engagements a month, he’s written seven books, including Deadlines And Overtimes, a compilation of some of his best work in an over 30-year writing career for The Inquirer.

The fascinating thing about Lyon is that in over three decades of writing about sports, Lyon never considered himself a sportswriter as much as he viewed himself as a people writer.

And to think it all blossomed from paging through a book called Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe his sophomore year in high school. It was a seminal moment that caused Lyon to think strongly about becoming a writer, changing his life and vast others who have been touched by Lyon’s words and thoughts.

“That was probably the foundation, and it’s very simple: you read, read, read, and write, write, write,” said Lyon, a member of the Philadelphia, Delaware County and Pennsylvania Sports Halls of Fame. “You can’t wear it out. You need to search to find your own voice. You start shamelessly aping someone you like, and eventually find your own voice.”

Lyon has had his chances to move, almost going to the San Francisco Chronicle in the mid-1970s. But the lure of this area has made him a fixture, to a point that he really wouldn’t consider living anywhere else. He may be a sturdy son of Illinois, but he calls Broomall home.

“This area is home now; it’s been home for me and two generations behind me,” said Lyon, who was the Grand Marshal of the 2010 Broomall 4th of July parade. “It’s a nice area and the people aren’t as rasping as midtown Manhattan. There is a Midwestern quality to this area and that’s the way we took to it. My wife Ethel and I have been here for 38-and-a-half years and it’s been a vaccination that certainly took.”

Lyon has had a career filled with the gamut of everything conceivable in Philadelphia’s rich sports tapestry. He came to Philadelphia in the summer of 1972 when the Phillies, Sixers and Eagles were awful—reaching depths of the 76ers’ 9-73 ineptitude, a 2-11-1 Eagles’ team and a 59-97 Phillies season, highlighted by Steve Carlton’s 27 victories that year. Yet reading Lyon made it all seem as if something better was on the horizon.

And it was.

The Flyers won back-to-back Stanley Cups, the Phillies won three-straight National League East Division titles, Dick Vermeil turned the Eagles into Super Bowl contenders and we had a Bill Lyon tell us all about it.

To this day, Lyon still gets approached by everyday people, wishing him the best—but mostly missing what his words meant to them.

“Part of me wishes I were still doing it, and part of me doesn’t,” Lyon said. “It’s a far different world today. What it comes down to is that we’re just not very nice to one another anymore. There’s always something wrong. In my profession, you just don’t have the sense of accountability and responsibility. It seems that there is a lack of simple civility. Finding the good in something is twisted around and it’s not the right slant today."

"It’s disheartening and discouraging," continued Lyon. "We just don’t treat each other with any sort of respect. But I’m enough of a romantic to think this could change too. I wanted my sons to be one inch than I was, and their sons to be one inch better than they were. This, too, it will take a while but we’ll get there again.”

Regrettably, though, what we may not see again is another Bill Lyon.