I was standing alone on Castleton University’s artificial turf athletic field last June, waiting for a girls lacrosse title game to start. From down the sideline, a tall fellow with white hair and dark glasses detached himself from a knot of men and strode purposefully toward me.
I wasn’t feeling social and inwardly groaned. Within minutes, however, I was laughing and exchanging stories with Mal Boright, the dean of Vermont sportswriters and a gentleman of wide-ranging interests who plied his trade at the Valley News during the early 1970s. Boright’s son, Barry, said my encounter was typical of his father, who died last month at his home in Williston, Vt., at age 81.
“My dad was the kind of person you loved as soon as you met him,” said Barry Boright, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. “He would open himself up and make you feel like you were with an old friend. He would come down and meet me and my friends for dinner and by the end of the night, they were hugging him.”
Mal Boright embraced myriad pursuits during his life. He was a journalist equally proficient on sports or news beats and in print or on the air. At various times, he was a reporter, an editor and a columnist, he read voraciously, played adult baseball and basketball with a teenager’s passion until he was nearly 70 and served his country as an Air Force medic and a census taker.
“He was a man for all seasons,” said retired Burlington Free Press reporter Mike Donoghue. “Not just the four seasons of weather, but mud season or the political season or whatever. He read at least three newspapers a day and could carry on a conversation about anything.”
Boright’s hometown was Newport, Vt., the 5,000-person seat of Orleans County and the second-smallest city in the state by population. It sits on the southern shore of Lake Memphremagog, near where Interstate 91 reaches the Canadian border, and has produced a New Hampshire governor, two Vermont governors and the first owner of the Boston Bruins NHL hockey team.
Boright’s mother was a hospital bookkeeper and his father moved to Florida when the couple divorced during Boright’s childhood. At that time, Newport’s International Club featured New England’s largest dance floor, a 200-by-67-foot surface, where revelers enjoyed the sounds of famous performers such as Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Rosemary Clooney, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.
A member of Newport High’s Class of 1952, Boright served in the Air Force from 1953-57 before studying at the University of Maryland, the U.S. Armed Forces Institute and New Hampshire’s now defunct Nathaniel Hawthorne College. He returned to northern Vermont, where he coached basketball at Newport’s Sacred Heart High and at Colchester High. He played for the Border Bandits men’s basketball team, became a certified basketball referee and worked for the Newport Daily Express newspaper.
From there, it was on to the Rutland Herald, radio station WVNY, the Burlington Free Press and eventually, the Valley News. There, he made a long-lasting contribution by hiring an irreverent scamp and recent Canaan College graduate named Donald Mahler as a sports writer. Mahler, who retired from the paper last year, recalled how he did his best to shake up the newsroom by reporting for work the first week dressed in a suit jacket with tails and a stovepipe hat.
“Mal didn’t even blink,” Mahler recalled with a laugh. “He had an air of dignity that was enhanced because he was taller than everyone else, but he also had an impish grin. He hired a series of long-haired weird guys to cover Upper Valley sports. He changed its culture in his own way.”
As he did at several of his work stops, Boright put together a basketball team of fellow employees that occasionally brought in athletic “ringers” so as to be more competitive. Steve Ward, who later built a career in the U.S. Marine Corps and is now the Dartmouth football team’s equipment manager, was one of them.
The Valley News outfit was named the “Nattering Nabobs” by its creator, a dig at U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew, who used that phrase to describe the media during a 1970 speech. The squad played charity games against high school coaches and faculty and once made a memorable appearance in a Windsor prison.
There, one of the Nabobs began trash-talking a large opponent about the “Mom” tattoo on his arm. At halftime, one of the prison guards, serving as a referee, ambled over to offer some advice. Turns out the man had been convicted for killing his mother and was understandably sensitive about the issue. No more discussion of the tattoo was heard.
Despite his height, Boright insisted on playing point guard. And despite his bonhomie, he could also be quiet and introspective. These spells would sometimes be broken, however, by his love of headline puns. He and Mahler had desks with the fronts pushed up against each other, and when the boss had crafted what he thought was a particularly clever announcement, he would zip his paper out of the typewriter and slowly spin it to face his protégé with an expectant look on his face.
“He always made me understand that what we did was fun, so we should enjoy it,” Mahler said.
Current Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon was also drawn into the business by Boright, who took on a series of local high school student interns. He plucked Kenyon out of his native Brownsville and paid him $25 a game to cover high school football contests. Kenyon did the same at St. Michael’s College in Burlington, again thanks to Boright.
“Mal was all about giving young people interested in journalism a chance,” Kenyon wrote in an email. “Forty years later, I’m still typing, so I owe a lot to him.”
Boright and his family, including four children, lived in Wilder when he worked locally. That ended after a divorce, but although he moved to the Burlington area, he was frequently back in town to visit his kids or attend their school events.
He got involved in television news at Channel 22 and radio on WVED. He once called high school basketball play-by-play despite suffering vision problems at the time, using a large magnifying glass so as to be able to read the team rosters and statistics sheets.
“Mal had a phenomenal memory about games from the past and who scored which big hoop at a certain time,” Donoghue said. “Later in our lives, we’d walk the sidelines together at a soccer game or we’d be at a baseball game and he’d be a stickler for getting the scoring exactly right on a rundown play. He would also do these incredibly complex football box scores with every statistic you could think of.”
Boright, honored as the National Sports Media Association’s Vermont sportswriter of the year in 1967, served a term as president of the Vermont Press Association and was inducted into the Vermont Principals’ Association Hall of Fame in 2012. Two years later, he was similarly recognized by the Orleans-Northern Essex County Athletic Hall of Fame.
Retirement from full-time writing led to practically more of the same. Boright delivered a three-minute sportscast each morning on WDEV and would periodically co-host a show called The Kid and the Geezer on which he and teenager Jasper Goodman would talk sports and play interviews Goodman had procured with Boston Red Sox players and management officials.
Boright’s chief pursuit from 2004 on, however, was covering sports for the weekly Williston Observer, a paper that had not ventured into that arena until Boright persuaded publisher Marianne Apfelbaum to give it a try. His writing mostly focused on Champlain Valley High in nearby Hinesburg and was a resounding hit. He spoke at the girls basketball team’s banquet one year and was known for attending contests in a wide variety of sports and for bringing positive and perceptive coverage to Redhawks athletes.
“He didn’t care if you were a Division III high school player or a professional,” Barry Boright said. “He always thought you should get recognition for whatever level you were in.”
Even after cancer surgery last fall, Boright kept a hand in the news business. He made suggestions about which games and teams the Observer should focus on, and his recommendations for improving the layout of a local library were sought even as he was in the hospital.
“He was always telling the newspaper people that he would be back soon,” Barry Boright said. “He was still thinking about coverage the week he died.
“I think he got up every day doing exactly what he wanted to do.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.
Correction
An earlier version of this story misspelled Mike Donoghue’s last name.