JIM DAVIS: MAKING HIS MARK

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

For some 30 years, Jim Davis was the principal field hockey writer for The Trentonian (N.J.), in the smallest market in the United States with two daily morning newspapers.

He was off the hockey beat for a month before leaving the sports editorship and returning to writing. But by 2003, he was grooming a former field hockey player from one of his favorite programs to possibly take his place -- which was much his situation when we spoke.

Dig deeply into the lower drawer of Jim Davis' desk, and you'll understand.

There, you will find a stack of accounting ledger books, some with cracked bindings, others with scuffs on the sides.

These are the meticulous year-to-year records of field hockey that Jim Davis has kept for three decades. Inside are year-by-year records of teams that don't even exist anymore, such as the local community colleges, a state deaf secondary school, and two tiny Roman Catholic schools at either end of Mercer County, in which the city of Trenton is located.

When he started sportswriting in the early 1970s, Davis had come back from a tour of duty with the Air Force, the youngest of a pack of writers in the Trentonian sports department who would go on to greater responsibilities.

In the late winter of 1974, he got a visit from one of the local coaches, who stormed into the Trentonian offices one day to demand that her team get equal newspaper coverage for girls' basketball. The Trentonian only covered boys' basketball at the time; only four of the Mercer County schools offered girls' basketball as a varsity sport.

"She said, 'I have an undefeated basketball team, and I would like to get you to write a story about them,' " recalls Davis. "We hemmed and hawed and eventually gave in."

That coach was Barb Major of Lawrence Notre Dame (N.J.). The confrontation changed his life as well as the direction of field hockey in the region by the fall of 1974.

"We had two guys and myself doing local sports, and all we were doing were covering boys' soccer, and I was stuck covering the third-best boys' soccer game every day," Davis says. "I was told that there was going to be a very important field hockey game in late October between Princeton and Hightstown, for the championship (of the Colonial Valley Conference). What I do remember about this game was that I wrote an advance for it; it was the first advance we had written other than football and big boys' soccer games."

When he showed up for that game in October 1974 at Princeton High School, Hightstown High School had brought its own supporters section: three busloads' worth.

"It was one of the biggest non-night game, non-state tournament game crowds I had ever seen," Davis says. "I was really impressed by that, and I like to think I had a lot to do with all these people showing up to see something that I knew absolutely nothing about. It was a great game."

In the late 70s through the 80s, Jim Davis immersed himself into the game every fall.

"I was hooked. Totally, completely hooked," he says. "I decided I was going to cover every girls' sport. I was going to stop doing the third-best baseball game in the spring, and the third-best boys' basketball game in the fall. Instead, I would do the best field hockey game in the fall, the best girls' basketball game in the winter, and the best softball game in the spring."

Using a very large faux-leather accounting ledger book, he kept tabs on every field hockey team -- college or varsity -- within a roughly 40-mile radius of Trenton.

"I was young, I was crazy," he says.

But it was something many beat writers did at The Trentonian; coverage areas were sometimes radically different from one sport to another.

Davis even moved down to Willingboro, N.J. for a time, living on the same street with several athletes he covered in basketball, football, and field hockey.

But by the beginning of the 1980s, Jim Davis' coverage style changed. He chose to turn his focus on the public school teams of Mercer County, writing weekly columns, profiling prominent seniors, and writing game-day stories on the 10 schools then in the Colonial Valley Conference rather than covering every single field hockey team in the paper's five-county distribution area.

"I finally got a sudden rush of blood to the brain, and thought, 'You could do a much better job of covering field hockey if you got to the point where you just covered the teams in the Colonial Valley Conference and forgot about everybody else,'" he said.

There were the occasional exceptions; West Amwell South Hunterdon (N.J.) was considered part of the Central Jersey family because until 1993, the school was part of the Central Jersey Field Hockey Association. In addition, Davis made sure that other areas abutting Mercer County would receive occasional attention. He added more coverage of the county's college preparatory schools by the early 1990s, and by the beginning of the 21st Century, Trentonian writers were crossing the river to do more games in Bucks County, Pa. while the coverage area of the competing Trenton Times was shrinking.

Throughout his three decades, Davis has seen players grow up before his eyes, and eventually saw some alumnae become coaches, doctors, and even sportswriters.

"I've got nothing but good memories about field hockey," Davis says. "What I seem to enjoy the most are the players who come back and coach. But I also have to like the parents, too. When I go to games, I don't sit at the scorers' table; I'd rather be with the parents and the fans and find out what's really going on. I love going to places like South Hunterdon, where the fathers are telling the referees, 'You missed a third-party obstruction back there,' and they were right. Now, those folks know their hockey."

Many a time, the memories are located in the record books on Davis' desk. Names leap off the pages because of their familiarity: Beth Bozman, the Duke and Princeton head coach who at one time was the caretaker coach at Ewing (N.J.); Val Ackerman, the Hopewell midfielder who would become president of the WNBA; and Melissa Magee, who would go from Princeton (N.J.) Day School to Old Dominion University and eventually to Trenton State College before settling in as an athletic director. Former players who became coaches permeate the lists, including numerous players who are now in Mercer schools.

As he thumbs through the books, Davis makes small comments here and there: "Ah, the Lone Ranger and Tonto -- they did a lot of scoring together." "Did you know she made commercials when she was five years old?" "The great thing was that she made everyone on her team better." "I don't remember her that much; she stopped calling halfway through the season."

The books reveal much, but dislodge memories of bygone days when the sticks were longer, the players less specialized, and the games were not held on artificial turf.

"The flash and all that good stuff is great, but I've always been about the person without the athletic gifts who could compete with smarts and hard work," Davis says. "There have been girls who have gotten onto the All-Mercer team who have gotten onto the team who got there through hustle and nothing else. They weren't one of the 11 best stickhandlers or scorers. You can tell that the dedication is there; those are the kinds of people I look for because they make the best story."

Even though Jim Davis' words about local field hockey athletes -- his "family" -- are not rare, he can be a man of a very few, very powerful words. When he was asked to speak at the 1997 Central Jersey Field Hockey Association banquet to mark his 25th year on the field hockey beat, he added a sentence at the end of his remarks calling for the resurrection of the senior all-star game. It happened the next December.

When a controversy erupted a year later about the voting procedures of the CJFHA, and a subsequent boycott ensued, a few well-crafted words from Jim Davis ended matters.

"Field hockey has been special for me because of the three coaches I have been dealing with for all these years," Davis says. "I haven't had that experience with Barb Skiba, Barb Major, and Joyce Jones on the sidelines with any other sports I have covered."

There are still a few things Jim Davis would like to see happen in the area field hockey community before he moves on. Davis, an African-American, has seen minority participation in field hockey actually drop since he started covering the sport.

And Trenton High School has never fielded a varsity field hockey team, despite the fact that a former U.S. men's national team goalkeeper worked for the Trenton district for a year, and one coach from a local private school is a Trenton resident.

"I am disappointed that a school like Trenton has never tried it, but I wouldn't want to see them pick up the sport without somebody who was really dedicated to the sport, and not just to say, 'Well, now we have field hockey,'" Davis says. "I can remember 20 years ago when every school had a girls' softball team but Trenton High. I remember approaching an athletic director and saying, 'You don't think you're wrong because you're the only high school in the county without a varsity softball team?' His response was, 'Maybe everyone else is wrong, and we're right.' I never could figure out what the hell he meant by that."

Davis sees a day when field hockey could be a sport for everybody; he remembers a story a black player told him when she brought some of her peers to a prep-school game in Princeton.

"She told me that her friends thought the sport looked exciting, even though they didn't know what was going on," Davis says. "But even though they thought they might like to try it, they knew there was no way they were going to play it in the inner city."

But enough of the right things would have to happen.

"What you really need is some black players -- of which there are not many -- to go to the inner city and say, 'Why don't we try field hockey?' That's what happened to softball 20 years ago," Davis says. "I think it would behoove a lot of black schools to look into having field hockey because it's a great sport. But you can't do it without a dedicated teacher in the system who knows the sport."

Even then, however, field hockey's relevance to the athletic experience depends on where you attend school, despite the more than 2,000 field hockey programs between high schools and colleges across America.

"Field hockey is still seen as a very obscure sport," Davis says. "But it's a sport that, if you try it, and have any athletic inclination, you can't help but love the intricacies of the sport. You can be smarter, and play circles around your opponents without being more athletically gifted. It's the toughest girls' sport in this country -- to learn it, to play it well, and to excel at it. I don't think you can find a team sport as intricate as field hockey."

As such, his kind of player is almost never the player with gifted hands or the gazelle's speed. Instead, he likes the hard-working defender who wins with guile.

"What people have to develop from field hockey is character," Davis says. "You need to develop people, develop field hockey players, and to have the sense of, 'I know what I have to do, and I have to go get it.'"

Davis has become a local legend in more than one athletic circle. He has covered basketball in the wintertime, has resisted attempts to assign him a beat for the spring sports season -- "I have been the de facto sports editor for about 10 years and spring is my time to relax," he says -- before plunging into his other great love.

That love is Little League baseball.

Before multi-network television coverage, controversy about age and regional eligibility and corporate sponsorship, Davis turned the coverage of New Jersey District 12 into an artform. Indeed, the Journal-Register newspaper conglomerate put Davis on a billboard on Route 1 leading into Trenton.

"I've had calls from people who told me they nearly drove off the road after seeing that billboard," he says.

As Davis has been getting older, there were times when he has wondered which sport would have a field named for him first -- a hockey field or a Little League field.

"It'll be probably a Little League field first," he says.

The years that Davis has been covering the game have included long hours and time away from his family. That has taken a toll on his health, which is reflected in the gaps in the logbooks.

"There's three years I missed keeping stats, because it seems like every five years I get sick," he says. "I didn't keep stats in '87, '92, and '97 due to illness; I get knocked on my butt by something. That means in 2002 I gotta watch out."

On the day of our 1999 interview, Jim Davis would prove to be more than correct in that assessment. He appeared more gaunt than usual in 2002 and 2003, raising concerns about his health, although he did not miss a season. Or his stats.