Remembering A Giant – SportStars Magazine Editor Chace Bryson Shares Memories Of Late Miramonte Basketball Coach Tom Blackwood

I first met Tom Blackwood as a first-year prep sports writer for the Contra Costa Times in February 2001. Only a handful of weeks into the job, he may have been the first East Bay basketball coach I met and interviewed.

I was dispatched to cover Blackwood’s Miramonte-Orinda team in a late-season home game. I don’t remember the opponent, or a lot of the details of the game. Most of what I remember about this game all happened once it ended.

Miramonte won — the Matadors did that a lot during Blackwood’s remarkable 38-year tenure — and I caught up to Blackwood before he could join his team in the locker room. Blackwood, who was already 36 years into that aforementioned coaching stretch, caught my eye and glanced down at my notebook. At that point, he could’ve easily big-timed the rookie reporter he’d never met, and asked me to wait while he spoke with his team first.

Instead, he flashed a grin, waved me forward and stuck out his big right hand.

In addition to answering all of my questions about the game, he asked a few of his own: When did I join the Times? Where had I grown up and had I played basketball? Our conversation probably only lasted seven to eight minutes, but it paved the way for one of my favorite professional relationships during the early part of my Bay Area writing career.

I learned in mid-October that Blackwood passed away in late September following complications with pneumonia. He was 81. Upon finding out, I had a number of fond memories of Blackwood surface. None more significant than that first meeting, though. As I’ve read recollections of him in the wake of his death, many have spoken of the passion and kindness that were evident in my first encounter with him.

“He was one of those people when you met him, you instantly liked him,” former Miramonte player Chris Kuhner said of his high school coach and longtime friend. “He was just so social. He liked to be around people. He lived life to the fullest.”

Approximately eight months after that first meeting with him, the newspaper named me to the regional boys basketball writer position that was vacated when Marcus Thompson II (a few of you may have heard of him) began his journalistic ascent. Blackwood was one of the first people to congratulate me.

Unfortunately, just a year later, Blackwood became the subject of one of my biggest breaking stories when parent pressure — largely related to the playing time he was giving to his son, Chris, a sophomore at the time — led to his resignation. I remember the pain in his voice when he called to tell me he wasn’t going to fight it.

I told both sides of the story, but it still seemed unfathomable to me that a coach who’d won 638 games and was just five years removed from an NCS title could have such an unceremonious end to his career.

We stayed in touch and saw each other often as I covered Chris Blackwood’s teams after he transferred to Miramonte’s archrival, Campolindo-Moraga. In his senior year, Chris Blackwood had 26 points, five rebounds and five assists in an NCS Division III championship win over Bishop O’Dowd-Oakland. That team reached the CIF Div. III Northern Regional final at Sacramento’s Arco Arena, losing to Santa Cruz 46-44. Blackwood led the Cougars with 17 points.

While I enjoyed talking ball with Tom in the years after his coaching days, I’ll always regret not getting to see him coach more. There was no doubt he still had the passion for it.

I’ll forever be grateful for his kind gesture to a young writer, and his honesty and candidness as a source in the years that followed. A group of Miramonte alums have begun a movement to get the Miramonte gymnasium’s court named in his honor. I think that would be fitting.

This column appeared in the November 2018 issue of SportStars Magazine. View it as well as the magazine’s 2018-19 NorCal Basketball Preview at SportStarsMag.com