Behind the Story: Berry Tramel
Berry Tramel has been covering sports in Oklahoma since before I was born. One of the most respected sports writers in the state, Tramel began his career covering sports for the Norman Transcript in 1978, when he was 17-years-old. After being sent to the counselor’s office as a senior at Norman High School, the counselor asked him what he wanted to do with his life, and he said the first thing that came to mind, “Well, I’d like to be a sports writer.” So she sent him to visit the Norman Transcript, where Tramel happened to meet the sports editor on staff and got a few minutes of his time. A few days later, the editor called Tramel and offered him a part-time job.
Tramel told me that when he began writing his first stories, he was doing them on a typewriter. That lead to our first real topic of conversation, how journalism has changed throughout his career. In the beginning, his sole focus was on writing for the newspaper. Now, most of what he covers never makes it to print. He records podcasts, writes for online blogs, and works in the TV studio shooting video, in addition to writing for the paper like he’s always done.
But one thing that he says hasn’t changed over the years for a journalist is his mission, “connecting with the reader, connecting with the audience.” He also explained that, with the Internet, he’s now able to connect and discuss with his readers in a way he was never able to do before.
Over the decades, Tramel has covered incredible athletes and characters, championship runs, and the arrival of a professional team in a city that’s never been home to one. This was why I was surprised that the story Tramel held most dear to his heart was about a boy on a high school basketball team, in a small town few have heard of.
Over twenty years ago in Lone Wolf, Oklahoma, there was a young boy who had wanted nothing more than to play basketball for his high school, but the teams in the neighboring towns had refused to play with him on the team. The young boy, Philip Tepe, was HIV positive. Philip’s mother tracked down Tramel’s phone number, which in the 90s wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do, and asked him to write a story about her son. He told her that if he was going to write this story, they were going to go all out. He would use the boys name and his picture would be in the paper, and the mother agreed.
After entering the house in Lone Wolf, Tramel recalls meeting Philip, who looked, “nine years old, and weighed about 90 pounds.” Tramel learned the young boys story and wrote his piece, which printed on the Oklahoman that next Sunday. After writing his story, the neighboring towns to Lone Wolf agreed to play, and Philip was able to fulfill his dream of playing basketball until, sadly, he died a year later.
I asked Tramel why this story was so important to him. He confessed that most of what he writes about isn’t very important. “It’s not important that Houston beat OU. It’s not as important as oil prices going up. It’s not as important as teacher’s salaries, or shouldn’t be as important. It’s not as important as earthquakes. It shouldn’t be important, but for some reason it is.”
Tramel admitted that, “this story, at its core, was a sports story; it was about a young man who just wanted to play basketball.” But through sports journalism, Tramel was able to reach an audience that before might not have cared, and he was able to use his platform to cause real social change and make this boy’s last year on earth a good one.
