Ron Fimrite, a renowned Sports Illustrated magazine writer who began working at the Daily Cal in 1949, will be honored as the Daily Californian Alumni Association's Alumnus of the Year at the Alum Reception on October 4, 2008. During his 34-year career with Sports Illustrated, Fimrite covered 16 World Series, two Olympic Games and several Super Bowls.

But Fimrite, 77, said he most enjoyed writing narratives that dug into the untold stories of charismatic athletes, some who tragically died at a young age. In his 1991 story, "A Flame that Burned Too Brightly," Fimrite flew to Princeton to conduct research on the death and life of Hobey Baker, a 26-year-old Princeton University graduate who is the only member of the College Football Hall of Fame and Hockey Hall of Fame. Baker's life was cut short in 1918 when he test-flew a plane in France after World War I, but some speculated his death was not accidental because Baker, who excelled in sports, did not want to return to work as a businessman. "If there is a message, people shouldn't forget these people. Those people are worth paying attention to and worth knowing," Fimrite said. "I like writers who can recover the past and make it live in the present."

Fimrite said it's important to look back at history because it provides context. When he visited Princeton in 1991 there were some students who were unaware of who Hobey Baker was, despite an image of Baker mounted on the wall. "What I hate about now is that everything is in the present. There's so little sense of history and to me that's vital," Fimrite said. "I don't think people should ignore history and there's a lot to learn about how we are now by looking at how we were then."

Fimrite grew up in the Bay Area and became a sports fan when he was 9, keeping up with baseball and football statistics and players. But when World War II began, Fimrite also closely followed the news on the war. By the time he was in high school, and later joined his school paper there, he was "pretty well read," Fimrite said.

At UC Berkeley, Fimrite majored in liberal arts, in the areas of political science, English and history. Fimrite started working for the Daily Cal in 1949, where he got his start as a sports columnist for the paper and later became sports editor. He called it a "valuable experience" and by junior year, Fimrite said he was "pretty well hooked" to journalism as a career. "It was an opportunity to play a little with words," Fimrite said of his sports column. "But (also) get a few laughs to things that people were taking very seriously."

Sometimes his opinions drew heat from university sports officials. He wrote a column at the Daily Cal saying the only people who watched Rugby games were women to see one of the team's players in short pants. Another column criticized the men's basketball team as "colorless" because they didn't play with flair. "That made the basketball team furious," Fimrite recalled, later adding he was supported by a San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist who urged him to "Keep it up, kid." And he did.

Fimrite later went to work for the Berkeley Gazette and the San Francisco Chronicle where he wrote news stories and later became a sports columnist. He then joined the Sports Illustrated staff. He still kept his humor as a sports columnist, joking in a 1994 Sports Illustrated piece the Lillehammer, Norway Olympic Games should have been held in the small town of Fimreite. That's because his grandfather was tired of the last name "Thompson" and changed it to "Fimreite," named after that town. That caused years of headaches within the Fimreite family of telling others how to pronounce their last name. Later, Fimrite's father dropped the middle "e" from the name.

Fimrite, who is retired, is a contributing writer at Sports Illustrated and has written and/or edited seven books. But he's still an old school journalist. He still uses a Royal mechanical typewriter to type his work. He enjoys the sound of the typewriter, Fimrite said. "I hit the keys so hard it drove me crazy to write on a computer," Fimrite said. Fimrite said he was honored to receive the Alumnus of the Year award. "First I was quite shocked, but pleasantly so," Fimrite said. "I was there so long ago, just like poor Hobey Baker people forget."