Longtime USA Today sports media reporter Rudy Martzke, who took the sports media beat into the mainstream, has died at age 82, according to multiple reports Friday.
Over more than two decades from 1982 to 2005, Martzke covered sports media for USA Today at what was an unprecedented level of depth, handing out kudos and criticism on a weekly basis. There had always been attention paid to sports media in the newspaper pages, but never as a true, dedicated “beat.” As the first practitioner of his kind, he wielded outsized influence that far exceeds anything possible today, when the sports media niche features any number of specialized websites and social media feeds.
“Every network executive will say he paid no attention to him,” longtime CBS analyst Billy Packer said upon Martzke’s 2005 retirement, “But I think he’s had an incredible effect on decisions that were made, on people’s careers both positively and negatively.”
Given his prominence, it should be no surprise that Martzke occasionally drew the ire of those he covered. After the NBA struck its 2002 media rights deal that shifted a considerable number of games off of broadcast and onto cable, Martzke regularly noted the negative impact on the league’s television ratings — prompting NBA commissioner David Stern to retort: “You shouldn’t believe what you read in USA Today, particularly if it’s in Rudy Martzke’s column.”
That was mild compared to the response he received from other sports media figures, most notably Howard Cosell, who Martzke said in a 2018 interview with the sportscaster David Halberstam had “the thinnest skin of any announcer I covered.” Martzke said he had received complaints from an eclectic mix that included “Pat Summerall, Chris Berman, Joe Garagiola, Gary Bender, Ken Venturi, Peter Alliss, Lanny Watkins and David Aldridge.”
If Martzke’s words could — as his own publication put it in a 2022 retrospective — “rattle careers,” it bears noting that he played a role in building one of the most prominent. Prior to USA Today, Martzke worked in communications for the Spirits of St. Louis of the ABA — and in that role he was instrumental in hiring a fresh-out-of-college Bob Costas as the team’s radio voice.
In the years following his retirement, Martzke purportedly maintained a presence in the industry by way of the “FakeRudyMartzke” social media feed, which continued to report news and notes about the industry as recently as earlier this month.
