Little twelve-year-old Johnny lay on the hospital gurney with tears streaming down his cheeks. As he looked at his mangled left hand, it wasn’t the pain that caused his tears. The nurse asked if there was anything that she could do, but he politely refused. He had spent the day helping his dad on a plumbing job. It was after World War II and most kids his age helped their dads when they could. He made one little mistake and lost the ring finger and pinky. His dreams of being an athlete were gone.John William Albers wasn’t a great athlete, but better than most in the small town of Fort Loramie, Ohio. He was good enough as a sixth grader to be a starter on the eighth grade basketball team. He was good enough to eventually play high school basketball and baseball and was pretty good with a hockey stick. But at twelve, he didn’t realize that he wasn’t going to be the next Howe, Cousy, or Ruth. He still believed that he’d be able to make a living in sports, but little did he know at the time that this very accident would push him closer to that dream.If you ask most people in the Dayton area who John Albers is, you would probably get a blank stare. Ask them who Bucky Albers is and you would probably get a smile. Bucky is the third of four generations of John Albers, but few people know him by that name.

“In the neighborhood that I grew up, I was a little younger than the other boys,” Bucky Albers says. “I tended to come out the loser in most of the fights that we had. So I would just put my head down and just ram them when I got mad. With that, they would call me Buck because I was bucking them all of the time.” The name stuck and it has been a fixture ever since.

Bucky was always a motivated kid. He was always looking for something to do athletically. Never one to lead the school in A’s, Bucky loved sports and did whatever he could to be part of whatever sport was in season. Although hockey was not considered a major sport at the time, it was one that the young men in Fort Loramie played with a passion. “I also played a lot of ice hockey on the ponds in the area. I would make the goals out of burlap bags — sewing them together. We would get empty coffee cans, put kerosene in them, and set them around the ice. We would go to Troy to watch the only professional hockey in the area. When the players would throw their broken sticks over the boards we would get them. I would take them home and repair them so we would have something to play with. You couldn’t buy them in the stores.”He eventually became a fairly successful pitcher in high school, but Bucky realized that the only way that he would make a living in sports would be to write about them. He had a long talk with his mother not long after his accident and they talked about the possibility of becoming a sports writer.

“In the seventh grade, I started writing in the school newspaper,” he says. “A couple of years later, I visited a friend in Piqua and saw my first high school yearbook. We didn’t have one in Fort Loramie. I talked to the teachers about putting one together and my senior year I was co-editor of the first yearbook that we ever had at Fort Loramie.” Although neither of his parents had been able to go to college and money was tight, Bucky headed to the University of Dayton after graduation from high school. The dream to make a living in sports was alive and well and he entered the School of Journalism with the hope of covering UD basketball. Albers shares those first steps.”Growing up, I read everything that I could get my hands on about them and listened to every game on radio. When I came to UD in 1956, I became part of the UD Flyer News and, of course, I wanted to cover football or basketball. They told me that they had guys to do that but they needed someone to write a story about UD’s new soccer team. I didn’t know what soccer was. There was no Wide World of Sports, there was no opportunity to see soccer. The only sports news that you saw was at the theater when you would see a newsreel about Major League Baseball, but certainly no soccer. I knew they kicked the ball into the goals, but I didn’t know how many players or anything about the rules. So I went to the library and read what I could about the game before I actually did the interview.”His journalism career had begun with a twist, but it wouldn’t take long before he would receive that first big break. Bucky was also working in the sports information office at UD. He wanted to do statistics at the football games but was told that freshmen have to wait their turn. He was given the job of getting hot dogs and drinks for the sports writers. “I was just a gopher but that was fine,” he says. “After doing that for three or four games, a sportswriter for the Dayton Daily News, Joe Burns, took me down to the newspaper so that I could see what one looked like. It was a Saturday afternoon and the copyboy didn’t show up. They asked me if I was interested in a job. Jim Nichols, who still works at the paper, was running the department. He took me over to a corner of the room where the pneumatic tube system was. He handed me an empty canister and told me to put the can in the tube. He told me that if it disappeared, I was hired. A few seconds later, I had a job. The first thing that I did was go across the street to the Arcade to get everybody’s dinner. The second thing was to go to the dry cleaners to get Si Burick’s cleaning. Those were my first two activities as a journalist.”He would spend almost two years working for the DDN before an offer to work for the Sidney Daily News was made. What started out as a summer job quickly became a full-time opportunity. Although he had only finished is sophomore year, the need for full-time employment outweighed the desire to get his degree. Bucky was the oldest of four and his sister was just graduating from high school and money was tight at home. Bucky would also work for the Fairborn Daily Herald before going to work for the Journal Herald in 1962 and returning to school part-time.

“I felt like I was walking around with my shoestrings untied and I really wanted to finish,” Albers admits. “It was tough going to class with 17 and 18 years old kids when I was 28 years old. I would work until midnight then go to Dominic’s Restaurant until 3 AM. I’d sleep from 3 until 8:30 and be in class at 9 AM. I’d study for Monday exams at stadiums when I would be covering the Browns on Sunday.” He finally received his degree in 1968, twelve years after he first stepped foot on campus.During his years working for the Dayton Daily News and the Journal Herald, Bucky has covered everything under the sun including being the beat writer covering the Reds from 1967 until 1974. It was during the Cinderella 1966-1967 basketball season that Albers had one of his most memorable interviews.

“Covering the finals that year was a lot of fun. It was after the championship game that I snuck into the UCLA locker room posing as a student manager and got an interview with Lew Alcindor. They didn’t allow anyone to talk to Alcindor at the time. I was the second writer for the Journal Herald at the finals and I was just there to write sidebars. I knew that the DDN would have the event covered well in the Sunday paper, so I had to come up with something for the Monday morning paper. I went out on the court to stand with the UCLA players when they were getting their championship watches. The student manager asked me if I could hold the game ball while he went out to get his watch. I just got lost among the players while they were getting ready to go into the locker room. I got in front of Lew because I knew that the guards would be more interested in watching him and I would be able to slip through. I sat right next to him, got my pad and pencil out and started to interview him. He didn’t mind doing the interview until Denny Crum threw me out. They put the story on the front page of the paper on Monday.”He also covered the Dayton Gems during their early years and was presented with a unique opportunity in 1974. “I got married and the job that had been the best job in the world had become the worst job because of the travel. I needed to do something else and there weren’t any good fits available. The Gems came to me and offered the General Managers job. I had been covering them and had followed hockey since I was a kid. They made the deal sweet enough that I just took it. I was about 35 and had never done anything but journalism and thought it was about time that I give something else a try. It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of aggravation,” he says.After a year at the helm of the Gems, Bucky realized that the headaches involved were more than they were worth and returned to the Dayton Daily News. He continued to cover different regional sports favorites. Another unique opportunity presented itself in the late seventies.

“In 1978 or 1979, I was offered the sports anchor job at Channel 7. They offered a three-year contract, but I just didn’t have the guts to take it. While I was making my decision, I had dinner with one of the sportscasters there. He was bemoaning the fact that he was working his 14th day in a row. When the red light comes on, somebody has to be sitting in front of the camera. I had two small children at the time and I came to the realization that I just couldn’t do it. I felt that I needed to be home to help raise these kids. I was used to doing in-depth interviews and after watching the two-minute interviews that most sportscasters did, I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”Finally in 1986, Bucky found his way back to the Flyers on a full-time basis. Even before this reconnecting, Bucky had been part of the Flyers and had good personal relationships with all of the Flyer head coaches, and he reminisced about each of them and their unique personalities.

“Blackburn was a grouchy old fart. He didn’t put up with anything. First time that I ever went down to the Fieldhouse, he had a manager remove me immediately. I got along with him just fine, but he was a mean son of a gun. Don Donoher is just a prince of a man. I had a good relationship with O’Brien but it got tougher toward the end. The newspaper began to pressure me to be more critical and do some things that I didn’t believe in. After he got fired, he was so bitter that he didn’t want to talk to the newspapers at all. Oliver and I have a nice relationship but he also realizes that a journalist could always come back and bite him.”The coaches aren’t the only things that have changed over the years. Relationships with the teams and the coaches are not what they were in the fifties and sixties. “It is different since Donoher left,” Albers says. “When they brought in O’Brien, it signified a change in the way that business was done at UD. We didn’t bring in one of our own as a coach. We brought in somebody from the outside. O’Brien wanted to immediately take over operation of the basketball operation, which used to be run by the Athletic Department. Oliver did the same thing. It is not nearly as much fun to cover the UD beat as it was back then. We would all go out to dinner together the night before when we were traveling. Now the basketball team is an independent group and the media is viewed as being on the outside. It’s not a big family anymore. Everyone is still very cordial and they help in making our arrangements for us when traveling. It’s not bad, it’s just different.”The entire sports industry has changed along with the environment. We are in the age of information and you either learn to become part of it or you are left behind. Cable television has completely changed our view of sports.

“ESPN has had more impact on sports than anything that I can think of,” he says. “When it first came on, we had a couple of writers stay up all night just to see what would be on and then wrote a story about it. They had to do a lot of fill early on, but now they do a great job of programming. Now everybody in sports watches it all the time. It has become a recruiting tool. If you are not on ESPN you are lost.”

If ESPN changed everything in the eighties, it was the Internet in the 1990’s. We are no longer slaves to the morning newspaper or the five minutes of sports that we can grab on the 11 o’clock news. Now at the click of a mouse, a mountain of information is available to us. “The Internet has changed sports reporting immensely and it is going to change it more. It has been a challenge for me, a guy that grew up with none of this. The resources that are out there are unbelievable. I get my stats from the Internet. Instead of getting faxes, I get them from web pages. Everybody now has the information that only the newspapers and TV used to have. My job has become more difficult because information that I have gotten from coaches during interviews makes it to the Internet before the paper is published as everyone is recording my interview.”

Bucky has done his best to keep up with an ever-changing environment over the years, but even the most experienced of writers can feel the pain of changing deadlines and increased expectations. “Our deadlines have gotten so much worse. I used to have until midnight to get a story done; I now have to have it in as early as 10 minutes after the conclusion of a game. I have to write the recap during the game and at halftime. In effect, you write the story backwards. You write a running account and then at the conclusion of the game you write three paragraphs describing the hero and put them at the front of the piece. Those stories look sloppy, but that is the only way that you can get them done.”

Although Bucky Albers has been through several jobs over the years, he remains the same man that took that first job with the Dayton Daily News. And he wants you to know it.

“I am who I am and everything that I write comes from whom I am and what I think is fair. You won’t see me flying off and writing something just because somebody gave me some information. I always make sure that I check out both sides of the story. If I write it, you can bet that I believe it is the truth. That is just the way that I was raised and I don’t know any other way to do it. You can’t be both a fan and a reporter. I can’t be a UD grad when I cover them. I can’t wear UD colors and I can’t cheer. I have to maintain objectivity. I have had an entire lifetime of being objective.”Bucky Albers is an everyday man. He will probably not win a Pulitzer Prize in the next year or two, but at the same time, reading Bucky is like talking to an old friend. He is the friend that won’t let us down and will always be there with the truth. You know what you get with John “Bucky” Albers, and for many of us, that is as goods as it gets.