I thought I knew a lot about Peter King, the sportswriter who got his start at the Cincinnati Enquirer before becoming the pro football guru who wrote the popular Monday morning NFL insider column for 27 years.
But I didn’t know that King picked up Boomer Esiason at the airport — in his two-door Volkswagen Rabbit hatchback — when the quarterback flew into town immediately after the Bengals drafted him and lineman Pete Koch in 1984.
“Hey, I’m Peter King with the Cincinnati Enquirer, here to pick you guys up. I cover the team,” writes King about his first encounter with Esiason in his new book, The Game, which he’ll sign 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 10, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
It wasn’t the best first impression. As Esiason squeezed into the back seat he said, “You have got to be (expletive deleted) me ... Welcome to the (expletive deleted) NFL!”
In the book, and in my conversation with him, King explained why being a general assignment sports reporter for the Enquirer was “the absolute perfect place” to launch his career. The first chapter of The Game is about his Cincinnati beginnings. King left the Enquirer in 1985 to cover the New York Giants for Newsday before becoming the authoritative voice of the NFL for Sports Illustrated (1989-2018) and NBC Sports (2018-2024).
King, 69, who grew up in Connecticut, first came to the Enquirer in summer of 1978 when he was a local news intern for the Enquirer’s Kentucky Bureau. He was a baseball fan who talked mostly about his beloved Boston Red Sox. I know that because King, a fellow Ohio University alum, roomed with me in that summer in my Northside apartment.
Despite only writing news stories at The Post, OU’s independent student newspaper, he was hired in March 1980 as an Enquirer general assignment sports reporter. What he learned from his Enquirer mentors launched King on a career that made him a star at Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports, and earned him three National Sportswriter of the Year awards.
“Cincinnati was the perfect place for me to start because I did not write sports in college at all,” King says. His Enquirer bosses, Jim Schottelkotte and Frank Hinchey, made him a general assignment reporter “to cover whatever needed to be covered.”
And that’s what he did.
King covered college basketball, including driving to Indiana University and interviewing mercurial coach Bobby Knight. Before boxer Aaron Pryor’s fight with Alexis Arguello in 1982, the Enquirer sent King to Nicaragua (back in the Golden Age of Newspapers, when the Enquirer had a huge travel budget) to profile Arguello before the “Battle of the Champions” in the Orange Bowl.
They asked him to write a sports radio/TV column. “I didn’t know anything about that stuff, but a Sunday column was a cool thing to have, especially when you’re 23 years old,” he says.
King also was the back-up Reds beat reporter in the early 1980s as the dismantled Big Red Machine were losing more games than they won. The Enquirer sent him to Bench’s hometown of Binger, Oklahoma, to talk to townspeople before future Hall of Famer Johnny Bench retired.
“It was all an utterly, absolutely fantastic experience to be traipsing around a locker room to cover the final days of the Big Red Machine. Johnny Bench was fantastic to me, and I have no idea why. He was a really good dude and helped me a lot. A lot of those guys, Davey Concepcion and Mike LaCoss and a bunch of guys on that team, were not very welcoming to the new kid on the beat. How can you have a better introduction to the business than what I had at the Enquirer? It was perfect for me,” he says.
In spring of 1984, King was assigned the Bengals beat. He had just celebrated his 27th birthday. “It was like the biggest thing that had ever happened to me in my life. Oh my God, I’m going to be covering a professional sports team in a sports-mad city,” he says.
When the rookie football reporter asked rookie head coach Sam Wyche about the upcoming draft, Wyche told him the Bengals’ wanted to take Arizona linebacker Ricky Hunley; Maryland’s Esiason; North Carolina guard Brian Blados, and Furman running back Stanford Jennings.
And they did. Sports Editor Greg Noble greeted King as “Nostradamus” when he came into the office on draft day. But 1984 was a vastly different time, before the internet, NFL Network and the 24-hour news cycle. The news wires didn’t care about one paper’s draft projections published hours before the draft commenced.
“Wyche told me who they were going to draft in 1984. It blew me away! I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t think he was serious. I thought that maybe he was trying to set me up, but he wasn’t. He just wanted to start off a good relationship with me,” King says.
Enquirer sportswriter Mike Dodd, his predecessor, was “invaluable. I would have never known nearly as much going into that job without Dodd. He took me under his wing and taught me everything about how to best cover an NFL team," he says.
Wyche, too, was a huge help. When King stayed in a dorm at Wilmington College with the team during training camp, Wyche told King he’d always be available for his questions after meetings, which often ended after 9:30 p.m. “I bet I knocked on his door at night 10 times that summer, and every time he would welcome me and he would answer all of my questions. He was just a really, really good guy,” he says.
King also watched practices alongside of owner Paul Brown. ”He was a very quiet guy, but if I had a question he didn’t mind answering it. I just didn’t want to be an annoyance to him,” King says.
The were no cell phones back then, so the Enquirer installed a landline phone in King’s dorm room to file stories and talk to the sports desk. The players in camp could only call home on two pay telephones in the college dorm. King ingratiated himself with Cris Collinsworth, Esiason and other players whom he let use his phone for free. (King says Enquirer management never questioned his long-distance phone call bills at Wilmington.)
King was also fascinated that Wyche did magic tricks for relaxation. In the book he tells how he got Wyche to pose for photographer Michael Keating in a tuxedo pulling a rabbit out of a top hat for his 1984 season preview story.
His Cincinnati chapter also has great stories about about Wyche’s innovative no-huddle offense; how the code name “Bruce” to change plays at the line of scrimmage was a nod to Bruce Springsteen; and how the players hated the Spinney Field practice facility in Lower Price Hill.
Next year, Peter and his wife, Ann, plan to move from Brooklyn, New York, to Seattle to be closer to their two daughters and three grandchildren who live in Washington and California. He’s still looking for his next passion before totally retiring.
“I’m 69 years old. I would like to do one or two things before I die for planet Earth. I covered a lot of football games, and it would be nice if I gave back to the human race, just a little bit, which I’ve just never done.
“My whole life Ann has sacrificed for me. I hate to say it, but I’ve always done what I wanted to do. I’ve had the time of my life. It’s been utterly fantastic. But there’s more to life that having Andy Reid diagram the winning play for you after the Super Bowl.”
When we talked, King praised his many Cincinnati mentors in the 1980s: Dodd, Noble, Mark Purdy, Lonnie Wheeler, Cindy Morris Starr, Bill Ford, Jack Murray, Schottelkotte, Hinchey and Associated Press staffers Andy Lippman and Joe Kay.
“There are so many good people who really had major roles in what I became,” he says. “Look, there is absolutely no way I could have had a better first five years in the business than at the Enquirer because it was absolutely great on-the-job training. You were expected to know what the hell you were doing right away. So there were great expectations if you were working for the Enquirer. It was such a great sports section. It was really, really good for me.”
Absolutely.
Peter King signs copies of his book, The Game, at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 10, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Rookwood Common.
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