Sports Journalist Rob Parker has been ahead of the game since starting his pursuit of journalism at Southern Connecticut State University. He has been featured on top sports shows such as ESPN’s ‘First Take’ and Fox Sports Undisputed. He is now the host of “The Odd Couple” on Fox Sports Radio.
Parker became the first Black sports columnist at two prestigious publications, with the first being the Detroit Free Press in 1993 and the Newday in New York in 1995. He also started the first Black-led radio station in Detroit, “Sports Rap Radio.”
“What bothered me is that how could we go from them hiring me and being Black, and the first person ever hired to fast forward to 2021-2022, and the all-sports radio in Detroit which is 80-90 percent Black, had zero Black hosts on the air. Something went wrong,” Parker said.
Parker said he feels there is a need for spaces where communities can be heard and have opinions. With “Sports Rap Radio,” he wanted to promote a barbershop feel and for Black people to resonate with the show.
“To be able to come up with the concept and put up a radio station on the air from scratch was incredible,” Parker said.
In the 80’s, Parker was covering the Knicks basketball team in New York. He touched on the fact that most White reporters would cover Major League Baseball and the NFL, while Black sports writers during that time typically covered basketball. Reporters knew this and joked about it.
“There used to be a big joke around all the Black writers where we called [NBA reporting] the ghetto beat because all the Black writers covered the NBA,” stated Parker.
During this period the NBA was smaller than the other sports in the United States. Major League Baseball was at the forefront, with the NFL in second.
“It was like a class system,” Parker said. “It was that women covered hockey, Black guys covered the NBA, and White guys had the NFL and Major League Baseball, and the highest-paying jobs were in Major League Baseball.”
Parker said he had to make difficult decisions in his career to help propel him to where he is today. Parker’s knowledge of and love for baseball propelled him to start covering the first all-professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds. Although this decision was monumental in his career, Parker received mixed reactions for moving to Cincinnati to cover the Reds at a smaller newspaper, but he wanted to cover baseball for a prestigious franchise with history.
“I left my hometown newspaper, the Daily News, in New York where I was covering the Knicks, and all my friends thought I was crazy,” Parker said.
The job offer in Cincinnati was huge for Parker. It offered higher pay than previous positions and allowed him to break through walls, he said. Parker is still covering baseball today on his site MLBbro.com, where he focuses on Black baseball players.
“Baseball is rich in our culture and history. We didn’t get into the Major Leagues until 1947, but if you look at all the records and players, a lot of them are Black, and that is a part of our culture that I don’t want us to lose,” Parker said.
That job propelled his career to new heights. Parker’s versatility to cover all sports was a commodity to publications, he said.
“The more you know how to do, the better off you will be in your career. If you know how to write, and be on the radio and podcast, you’re going to be way more valuable in your career,” Parker said.
Parker has been in the journalism industry for almost 40 years — on air and in print. He has become a mentor to Black sports journalists.
“He’s very much down to earth, he cares about the young black journalist, he stands alone in that honestly,” said ESPN reporter DJ Bien-Aime.
