Woody Paige was not born in a log cabin.
But, as a baby, he slept in a drawer in the kitchen of his parents’ three-room “shotgun’’ house (with an outhouse) a street away from young Aretha Franklin’s home.
Then, the Paige family lived in a government housing project, with teenager Elvis Presley and his father and mother as neighbors.
Sixty years later, Woody would take over NBA guard Allen Iverson’s penthouse, then NFL quarterback Brock Osweiler’s condo in Denver.
It’s been quite a journey for Paige, the witty and charming commentator on ESPN’s popular and highly-rated rated “Around The Horn’’ and the national award-winning sports columnist for The Gazette in Colorado Springs.
For more than a half century, Paige has been a journalist for major daily newspapers, magazines and websites, a daily radio talk show host, a panelist on multiple ESPN daily shows, a regular TV something or other locally and internationally, the host of a syndicated podcast, the author of nine books (including three best-sellers), a bit actor in major movies and television shows and a legend in his spare time.
Although considered by some (many) the resident clown at ESPN for the past 18 years – appearing on, and winning more often than any other panelist on the venerable “Around The Horn,” as well as “Cold Pizza,” “Dream Job,” “First and 10” and “SportsCenter.” Paige actually played a clown in a Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Baily performance. He played himself, a stretch, in the movies “Rocky Balboa” and “Nebraska” and the TV show “Playmakers.”
He has flown with the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels (and vomited during the landing in the end), won two celebrity harness races, lost a camel race, driven a pace car around the Indianapolis 500 track, played in pro-am golf tournaments with Phil Mickelson, Hale Irwin and Ernie Els, and played touch football against Elvis. He worked as a roadie at a Jackson Five reunion tour concert, drank beer with Jimmy Buffet and Darrius Rucker of “Hootie and The Blowfish” and Irish whiskey with “U2” band members, and played blackjack alongside Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley in Monte Carlo.
Paige peed in the White House Oval Office bathroom, had one loaf of bread to feed 200 surrounding kangaroos in the Australian Outback, got into a snowball fight with a military officer in the former Yugoslavia, hit a golf ball off the Berlin Wall, was chased by wild boars in Fiji, flew with Arnold Palmer on his private jet, played golf and got ripping drunk with the first American in space and moon visitor Alan Shepard, had Tom Brady wink at me before a Patriots game, slept in the Eisenhower Cabin at Augusta National and the Donald Trump Suite at Doral, hung out with the Beach Boys and Willie Nelson and the Blake Shelton Band, did a weekly TV show with John Elway and was told by Fidel Castro that the first Gulf War had just started.
Woody has covered more than 40 Super Bowls, 14 Olympics and every major college championship in football and basketball and professional sports multiple times – World Series, NBA Finals, Stanley Cup, Masters and The Open, Wimbledon, Daytona 500, World Cup and games on four different continents. It’s been estimated that Paige has written about almost 10,000 sports events.
Paige covered and wrote about the aftermath of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City, the Columbine and Aurora Theater mass shootings in Colorado, civil rights marches in the South in the 1960s and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, five national political conventions and a presidential inauguration.
Paige has received more than 150 local, state and national awards, including the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha’s highest honor (The Order of Achievement), the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention annual award and the “Distinguished Alumni Award’’ from his alma mater – the University of Tennessee. He has won several APSE national awards and has been a multiple-year recipient of the “Best Sportswriter In Colorado’’ award.
His first paying journalism job was as sports editor of The Whitehaven Press when Paige was 16. He has been employed by The Knoxville Journal, The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. He is the only person in Colorado history to be a sports columnist for the largest three daily newspapers in the state and the only person to work for all five major TV stations and 16 radio stations in Denver.
Paige is finishing his first novel, starting “The Woody Paige Podcast,” doing the second edition of Woody Paige’s Chalkboard Tales and reimagining “woodypaige.com.”
Woodrow Wilson Paige Jr. is 73 and has a daughter – Shannon Hunt Paige. Paige is a speaker at dozens of charity events, high schools and colleges, and corporate conferences each year.
As a boy, Paige would sit on a porch at Lauderdale Courts, a government housing complex near downtown Memphis, and listen to Elvis sing and play the guitar. Paige played in a nearby field, which is now the site for St. Jude Hospital, one of Paige’s favorite causes with the Children’s Diabetes Foundation.
Woody once was described on a TV show as a sports version of Will Rogers and Mark Twain.
Paige yearns to do something worthwhile with his life before it’s too late.
