Bill Speltz, Sports Columnist
When you get nothing and still love it
By Zach Flickinger
Little lefty fielding playground wisecrack. Worn-out grips and unwashed irons. Caddyshack, The Cosby Kids, Bryant Elementary School, egg packaging, sports father, volunteer coach and family.
If you’ve been keeping up with the Sunday sports columns in the Missoulian the past couple of years, you’ll know whom we are talking about: Bill Speltz.
“When I first started out I was just a young, naïve writer — just wooden stories,” Speltz, 52, said. “I was working for my hometown paper when this opportunity came up for a sports columnist here in Missoula.”
Speltz’s passion for sports writing has not wavered in years of writing a weekly Sunday sports column and crunching numbers.
It’s persisted through a recent, unsteady period at the paper, when the departure of sports editor Bob Meseroll increased the workload for the sports section, now only consisting of three full-time and one part-time staff.
Nick Puckett, the part-timer who is also the sports editor at the Montana Kaimin, has seen the impact of the change in the newsroom.
“Without a clear-cut leader, each one of the three guys that work there have to step into a different leadership role,” Puckett said. “Bill has been a good leader throughout this whole mess.”
Speltz grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, a community where sports played a prominent role. His pursuit of baseball brought him to a junior college with a journalism program.
Three years into the business, and at the smallest daily in Iowa, he won an award from the Iowa Newspaper Association for a sports column he penned about his wife having their first child.
Writing about the human side of sports is why Speltz continues to love his job here in Missoula.
“We all have goals; we all have disappointments,” he said. “I think it’s important because it shines a light for the human condition for all of us.”
Which is why, in his columns, he shares his love of the movie Caddyshack; golf outings with worn-out grips and unwashed irons; the irony of being in The Cosby Kids; attending Bryant Elementary School, and describes himself as a “little lefty fielding playground wisecrack.”
It’s also why he continues to tackle new challenges, as when he recently covered Revolution Cage Combat II, his first live MMA fight. His story opened with the line, “Poise under duress is not something you learn from a textbook.”
In his 32 years in journalism, Speltz has not been spared from criticism.
This spring, the Missoulian disabled comments online, arguing that hatefulness can hurt innocent subjects of the stories.
Speltz says he was thankful for this decision, though he believes that handling criticism comes with the job.
“It’s good, for example, for my son to see the negative things that folks say about me,” he said. “Everyone has to go through adversity and criticism. It’s all about how you handle it.”
