deseret
Recently, I learned that my colleague and friend, Lee Benson, is going to be inducted into the Utah Sports Hall of Fame, class of 2026.
My first thought: Great.
My second thought: Wait, what? Hes not in there already? The last time Benson wrote for the Deseret News sports department, email was just being invented.
He became a general columnist in 1997, but before that he was a sports columnist and Chief Observer and commentator for a golden age in Utah sports the BYU quarterback factory, LaVell Edwards, Danny Ainge, Danny Vranes, the Utah Jazz (their arrival from New Orleans, Larry Miller, Stockton/Malone, the NBA Finals), BYUs national football championship, the Miracle Bowl, Ron McBride, Frank Arnold (remember him?), Jerry Pimm (remember him?), Urban Meyer, Alex Smith, the Winter Olympics, the bid scandal, etc.
He answered the bell for 25 years, except for the time he sent his identical twin brother Dee to a road game in his place so he could stay home and recover from the flu (no one noticed).
It was a great time for sports writing and Benson was on top of his game.
He was a writer first, not a fan with a keyboard like so many nowadays.
Sports was his chosen vehicle to tell stories, which offered a writer drama, humor, struggle, triumph, loss and a wide variety of characters.
Where else could you find a man like Rick Majerus? A generation of readers looked forward to opening their Deseret News to see what Bensons take was on all of the above.
Overdue honor Anyway, three decades later, someone apparently remembered or realized the role that Benson played on the Utah sports scene.
On Sept.
14, he will be inducted into the Utah Sports Hall of Fame, along with Olympic skier Shannon Bahrke, Pro Football Hall of Fame bust sculptor Blair Buswell, quarter horse jockey Cody Jensen and wrestler Ben Kjar.
Beginning in 1972 the year Watergate blew up (look it up, kids) Benson covered high school sports for four years and college sports for two before becoming a sports columnist or rather, The Sports Columnist.
He was Utahs Jim Murray (look him up, kids).
Kurt Kragthorpe, a longtime sports writer for the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune, put it this way: For a quarter-century, Lee was by far the most recognized sports journalist in Utah, while making a further, lasting impact in developing other notable writers.
He was voted Utah Sportswriter of the Year by members of the National Sports Media Association 14 times during the 15 years between 1976 and 1990.
The Deseret News held Benson in such high esteem that the newspaper pried open its wallet to send him to the worlds biggest stages 16 Super Bowls, 14 Final Fours, 13 golf majors, 10 Olympic Games, eight NBA Finals, five World Series and one Wimbledon.
And they pay you to do this! It was an amazing run and to think, it all started on a whim.
Here, stolen straight from the introduction of his book The Best of Benson, is how Benson used his inimitable writing style to describe the beginnings of his 55-year writing career: I didnt set out to be a sports writer.
I didnt set out to be much of anything, other than employed.
But there I was, an undergraduate at BYU in the 1970s, the beginning of the Me Decade, running out of majors and, worse, running out of excuses to spend my dads money.
Journalism! I hadnt tried that yet.
I walked into the office of The Daily Universe one day and asked if I could write a story.
The sports editor was R.C.
Roberg, the first of thousands of fascinating characters I have since met in and through journalism.
R.C.
used Scotch Tape to keep his hair behind his ears.
BYU had its standards.
R.C.
Roberg had his.
I was dispatched to the Smith Fieldhouse that night to do a story on a wrestling meet between BYU and Utah.
..
I discovered something with that innocuous wrestling assignment: I liked to write.
It felt almost like recreation to me.
A light went on.
And they pay you to do this! That worked out for everyone, because if he enjoyed writing, readers enjoyed reading his writing.
His columns were, well, fun.
The hallmark of Bensons columns is that theyre always light and breezy, as if they had been written effortlessly, blithely.
I envied him because I always found writing so laborious.
After covering a game or some assignment together, wed return to the hotel and then go our ways hed go for a walk and then return to his room and write what hed composed in his head during the walk, while I was bent over my computer screen with beads of blood forming on my forehead.
It wasnt fair.
Brad Rock, Bensons colleague and fellow (retired) columnist, is spot-on when he says, Lee has always been true to his voice.
Lees columns always sounded like Lee which is to say as good as it gets.
Wed sit down to write back when we wrote in an office and it was like he was hearing the column in his head and writing it verbatim.
His first draft was pretty much his final draft.
He could write a phenomenal column in an hour.
Lee is so good he can make you want to read an entire 800-word column about fly fishing.
A turn of phrase Im a stream-of-consciousness writer, Benson says when pressed on the subject.
One thing bleeds into the next.
Sometimes its a great thing, sometimes I paint myself into a corner.
..
If I have to go back and edit something, I would have to dismantle this whole maze.
The late, great John Hughes, the former editor of the Deseret News (and, before that, the Christian Science Monitor), used to say, Lee has a gift for a turn of phrase.
In other words, he has a distinct, often surprising or clever way of saying something that was memorable, something worth reading twice.
It is a natural skill he has with language.
Give the same subject to someone else and it dies on the page; Lee made it entertaining.
He produced one-liners like this one: He made friends like a cocker spaniel.
And this: The two most obscene words in the English language: extra innings.
And this: I dont know who invented Fathers Day, but Im pretty sure it wasnt a father.
He wrote this, too: On the auspicious occasion of the first NBA Finals game ever to be played here in Salt Lake City, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all members of the Chicago Bulls, their bodyguards, accountants, body piercing artists, hairdressers, manicurists, podiatrists, managers, book agents and, of course, both their fans.
Writing about Larry Bird refusing to reenter the end of a blowout win when he needed only one steal to complete a 30-12-10-9 quadruple double, Benson noted, Only two things stopped Bostons Larry Bird from recording double figures in points, rebounds, assists and steals and producing the first such quadruple double in the history of the NBA Monday night: himself and the fourth quarter.
Light touch He wrote mostly commentary and observation pieces about people and events and games, and occasionally he would do a long-form piece, but no matter the subject, he pulled readers in with his light touch.
This is what he wrote about the beginnings of Tony Finaus golf career: He bought clubs at Deseret Industries and the Salvation Army for 75 cents apiece and cut them down to junior size.
He checked a copy of Golf My Way by Jack Nicklaus out of the library and that became his instruction bible.
He went to the municipal course down the street and after realizing there was no way he could afford to do anything that cost money, discovered that anybody could pitch and putt on the practice green for free.
He went home, collected a bunch of golf balls from neighbors whod heard what he was up to, backed the car out of the garage, and put up a mattress on the wall that the boys could hit into off strips of carpet he placed on the floor.
The Finau Country Club was open for business.
Benson began his professional career at the Deseret News on Dec.
29, 1972, and wrote through the next five decades.
He came along during a time that encouraged writing, not clickbait on X.
What we really do is tell stories and sports, to me, has always been the best place to find stories, he says.
That was particularly true in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, until the internet took over.
Newspapers were relevant, the sports section was king; very often people heard the stories first in the paper, and the sports writing was more writing, hence more fun, and less analysis, as is the case today.
Bobby Knight-ed Not everybody understood that take, for example, the late Bobby Knight, the famously surly, rude, angry, condescending Indiana basketball coach whose success on the court was greatly overshadowed by angry outbursts and ugly incidents.
Benson and Knight were in New Orleans for the 1987 Final Four, Benson to write about it, Knight to coach his team.
One of the events that week was a meeting of coaches and reporters.
At some point, Benson decided to wade into the discussion.
The gist of his comment was that writing about basketball was not rocket science and that the real purpose of the media was to inform and entertain readers.
Knight jumped on it, saying something like, You shouldnt be in here.
You dont understand the game.
You miss the important points of a game.
As fate would have it, Benson was alone in an elevator afterward when none other than Knight stepped aboard.
Benson, trying to break the ice, said, Well, I enjoyed our exchange in there.
The 6-foot-5 Knight, looking over Bensons head, said, The trouble with some people is they dont know how to keep their (expletive) mouth shut! To which Benson replied, Yeah, and you lead the league in that category.
So much for breaking the ice.
We stood there in silence, says Benson.
I was thinking, if hes going to hit me, Im going to hit him back.
Fortunately, the door opened and a few more people entered the elevator and that was that, but the story reveals how little coaches understood about the medias role.
We werent there to do PR for them, recalls Benson.
He thought we were clueless about basketball.
It wasnt about basketball.
My whole intent was to entertain readers.
It sounds selfless, but it wasnt.
I just wanted to write something that would make people laugh or smile or even get ticked off.
I just didnt want to be boring.
Postscript: Two nights later, there was a banquet that required Knight to present a ceremonial gavel to the incoming president of the U.S.
Basketball Writers Association Benson.
He had to do it, and I had to do it, recalls Benson.
At least he didnt hit me over the head with (the gavel).
Beginnings Benson grew up on a small farm in Sandy, a block away from the old (and since razed) Jordan High School (now the site of Jordan Commons).
As a boy, he harrowed fields on a tractor and crawled into irrigation ditches to clear out the tumble weeds.
My dad phased out of farming when I was 9 or 10, thank goodness, says Benson.
He and his identical twin brother, Dee, were popular and funny (and chronically tardy), according to an old classmate, Gerald Greenwood.
Everybody loved them, he recalls.
They were just good guys.
They were easy to be around.
They made you laugh.
After high school, Lee and Dee went separate ways for a time.
Lee attended Southern Utah State University (now SUU) and Dee attended BYU.
A year later, they both departed on church missions Lee to England, Dee to Sweden.
When they returned, they roomed together at BYU and then tried to figure out what they would do next.
Thats when things got complicated.
A year after graduating from BYU, Dee decided that coaching and teaching high school students werent for him.
He returned to school for a law degree and went on to a brilliant legal career, serving as a federal judge, the U.S.
attorney for Utah, chief of staff for Sen.
Orrin Hatch and associate deputy attorney general in the attorney generals office in Washington.
It was a surprising turn of events for a guy who majored in P.E.
at BYU.
Long-range planning for us was next Wednesday, Dee once said (he died of brain cancer in 2020).
I tell this story because Lee also never foresaw the career he would undertake or the immense success that would come his way.
Lee cast around for a major general ed, economics, business, and then came that day when he volunteered for duty at the school newspaper and his future opened up in front of him like a window.
Lee, who had read the Deseret News sports page every evening in his youth, was a journalist at the Deseret News.
He was a sports writer/columnist from 1972-97.
By the end of that run, he had moved to California for a change of scenery and to work on a book about LaVell Edwards, BYUs legendary football coach.
He stopped writing for the Deseret News for a year, but then Hughes, at the urging of chief photographer Tom Smart, called Benson and asked him to return to the paper as a general columnist.
Benson turned his wit and his keen powers of observation and critical thinking on the world at large.
Benson has had three careers, really sports writer, general columnist, author.
He has written more than 30 books on everything from the BYU quarterback factory to Elizabeth Smarts kidnapping to Edwards and the Olympic Games.
Benson pleasant, affable, humorous made a lot of friends on the way (like a cocker spaniel) and he seemed to know everyone in the state: athletes, coaches, businessmen, politicians, media.
In my estimation, he will always be the quintessential Most Popular Kid in class.
Im not sure where this story fits in, but I have to tell it: Once, when we were starting to write our stories following a game in Laramie, Wyoming, a Salt Lake Tribune reporter became ill in the press room.
Benson wrote his story for him.
Thats just the way he was and is.
Many years ago, one of LaVell Edwards assistant coaches complained to me about Benson and said some disparaging things about him.
I was incredulous.
I asked him, Do you know him?! Have you ever really talked to him? No, he said.
I said, Hes a good guy, the best.
Youd like him.
Everybody does.
The coach replied, Thats what LaVell told me.
Everyone likes Lee Benson, the columnist and the man.
Well, except Bobby Knight.