R.I.P.: Rudy Martzke, Sports Journalism Pioneer

 A pioneer in sports journalism, Rudy Martzke rose to national fame for covering sports television and media in the late 20th and early 21st centuries before it was its own cottage industry. Nobody had covered sports entertainment that way before Martzke started his column at USA TODAY as an original employee during the newspaper’s launch in 1982.

Martzke died Wednesday at the age of 82, following complications from pneumonia.

Martzke rose to national fame for covering sports television and media in the late 20th and early 21st centuries before it was its own cottage industry. Martzke died Nov. 20, 2024 at the age of 82.

In the heyday for newspapers in America, Martzke’s back-page column ran three times a week and was a must-read for not only people in the business – from the C-Suite to the production truck – but for fans who wanted to see how their opinions stacked up against the announcers they watched all the time.

His words revolutionized how fans watched sports. The Internet was fledgling at best as his career wound down, and social media didn’t exist. To figure out who was up and who needed to improve behind the mic, reading Martzke was essential. The information was valuable. The prose was entertaining.

Martzke began his career writing about sports for the East St. Louis Journal and covered the city’s professional teams. But he jumped into the public-relations side of the business and became a publicist and director of operations for the ABA's Spirits of St. Louis. It was while working there he encouraged the local radio station KMOX to hire a kid from Syracuse University named Bob Costas to call the team's games in 1974. Costas became a lifelong fan of Martzke’s work, and Martzke said Costas was among his favorite people in the business to cover.