His parents never married and split up when he was four years old. It was like, ‘Okay, well, how else can I do this?’ And so once I seized on something that I really loved, and it seemed interesting to me, I was like: ‘Alright, I’m just gonna do this,’ and I also think I was too naive to think, ‘Man, the odds here are really long, it’s really hard to get a minor league job, it’s even harder to get a job in the big leagues.’ I just was like, ‘I’m gonna figure this out and see where it takes me, and I just didn’t worry about any of the other stuff.’”įord was born in Jamaica, Queens. I wanted to just figure out a way out, once I realized I wasn’t going to be a professional athlete. I think I knew that for a long time, even before I figured out the journalism stuff, and even if that had never happened, I knew I wanted to work in sports. Speaking on his determination, Ford said, “I just knew I wanted to be in sports. Simply put, he is a trailblazer in his field. Furthermore, he is one of only two African-American men ever to commentate a Series deciding game in the World Series. It was an ingenious way of ensuring that the news of the event was captured, and it opens a window into Ford’s ingenuity and grit as a journalist.įord is now one of thirty primary play-by-play radio announcers to given commentary for a Major League Baseball team and only one of four African-American men ever to hold that title. In a fit of organizational heroics, Ford was able to find a place as far downtown as he was allowed to go where he could transfer film of the event via a man who was paid $40 to run with the film from the World Trade Center to where Ford stood. His paper by chance had one reporter with a 35mm film camera by the World Trade Center as the events were unfolding, and he was able to take photographs as events transpired, although there was no way of getting the film back to the paper. Although his focus was mainly on sports, this story was so big that every reporter had to work it. Two minutes before the second plane hit, after he heard the news, Ford immediately knew it was not going to be an ordinary day. He arrived in the office at 9:00 AM, 14 minutes after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center. Robert Ford had just graduated college and was working his first job as an assistant Sports reporter at the New York City Bureau of a Japanese newspaper called the Yomiuri Shimbun, on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. Robert Ford joined me on a Zoom call from MLB Spring Training in West Palm Beach, Florida.
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