Ben Taylor
Sports Editor
“In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have.”
These words composed the penultimate paragraph of LeBron James’ letter announcing his return to the Cleveland Cavaliers in July of 2014. But they also aptly sum up Wooster alum Joe Vardon ’02’s life working as a sports reporter.
Vardon works for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer as an NBA reporter on special assignment, but as he recently told the Wooster website, “Really that means writing about and reporting on all things LeBron.”
“I came into the business at a time when it was harder to get jobs and move up, and the question is why,” said Vardon. “I always point back to the work ethic. I have always tried to work harder than the next guy. … And I know where that started.”
Covering LeBron is any sports fan’s dream assignment, but it’s one that Joe Vardon can undertake only because he has a special combination of skills learned by covering both sports and politics.
“Cleveland.com wanted someone specifically just to cover LeBron James, which meant that you needed to have this background in sports but you also needed to understand politics and business and finance and social issues and all of these things,” said Vardon.
His journalism career really began after his sophomore year of college, when he was working in the mailroom for the Akron Beacon Journal. One day, he slipped some of his writing samples onto the Sports Editor’s desk. Not long after, he had stringer work covering high school sports. He spent the rest of his time at the College covering high school football and basketball for the Journal.
When Vardon graduated, he took a job at Wooster’s The Daily Record covering local and Cleveland sports, including the Cavaliers, until 2006. After four years of this, an opportunity to work at The Toledo Blade, which had always been an aspiration, presented itself, and Vardon took a position in August 2006. There weren’t available positions at the time in sports, and his tasks included reporting on suburban and county government, spending time on the investigations team and covering the presidential primaries and general election of 2008. After several years on the job, including a period of time back in sports, he ended up covering the gubernatorial race in the fall of 2010.
Working at the Blade was the first time Vardon moved beyond covering sports, but somebody must have liked his work; The Columbus Dispatch offered him a position covering the governor’s office full-time.
This time in political journalism proved instrumental in his development as a reporter; he was provided with the opportunity to travel the world over with Governor John Kasich and to see powerful political figures acting internationally.
Whether at The Daily Record or The Toledo Blade, whether covering sports or suburban city council government, Vardon’s ethos has been to work as hard as he can.
For someone with no formalized journalistic training, time covering news, both in the governor’s office and at The Toledo Blade, helped to hone his skills.
“I was going to work every day with people at the time who were working at The Plain Dealer, and the Beacon Journal and the Dispatch and other big places, and I just saw how much of an advantage that could be in the sports field if you had a really solid background in news. I did realize that it would be better for me to stay in or close to news to gain that kind of experience.”
But while his on-the-job experience introduced him to the specifics of covering news, he had been learning the tools he needed for much longer. This started with his time at Wooster, even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time.
“I’ve always said that you don’t know what path you’re going to take when you graduate from Wooster, but the one piece of advice that you can [expect] is that the opportunities that are given to you now there are precious, and you’ve got to try to take advantage of them,” Vardon said.
Vardon was a communications major, and, equally important to his personal development, a baseball player.
“[Joe] would probably be the first to tell you that he probably tried more to major in baseball than in an actual academic area,” said Denise Bostdorff, professor and current chair of the department of communications, who had Vardon in a number of classes.
While that may be true, Vardon considers his time spent playing baseball just as important to his development as a professional.
“More than any time probably ever in my life, [Coach Tim Pettorini] instilled in me this idea that nothing is given, that you have to earn everything, and that when you think you’ve done well and you think you’ve reached a certain place, there’s always room to be better,” said Vardon.
Hard work has been the prerequisite for getting to where he is today. Entering the print media industry during the height of its decline has not been an easy task for Vardon.
But while baseball taught him how to work hard at something he knew he loved, it was his time in the communications department that seems to have helped him learn how to put in effort in an area that may not have seemed to be of immediate interest. He says that he was on “cruise control” during his time at the College and wishes that he would have taken greater advantage of the academic opportunities presented to him during his time here.
When Vardon talks about his life, he points consistently to the mentors who taught him how to be better, how to put forth greater effort. On the academic side, he points to Bostdorff most of all.
“Bostdorff was one who occasionally did push me as a student and did say that something I had turned in or a way I was carrying myself in class wasn’t good because she knew I could do better.”
Vardon is a case study in the value of hard work and the development of tools of critical inquiry across a variety of fields.
“[I’ve] never been handed anything,” said Vardon. “And learning how to do that, learning how to fight that battle, that’s what happened at Wooster, playing baseball and learning how to push yourself and to apply yourself even in the face of adversity, and then from an academics perspective, being drilled every day to think critically and to present those thoughts in written form in a way that most College students aren’t.”
“[He] just was the heart and soul of the team,” said Pettorini. “I don’t think those guys would go to bed without calling Joe to find out if it was okay. He was kind of like the mayor. He just knew everything that was going on. He just worked his butt off. … He had to work extremely hard with all that talent around him just to get any time at all. And he did. … Everybody just kind of loved Joe.”
“I’m really so happy to see how successful he’s been because he does really hard work, and he’s also a person of just such great character. So to be able to see someone succeed who’s got both of those is just really nice because it doesn’t always happen that way,” said Bostdorff.
Work ethic is a practice that must be learned. For Joe Vardon, his time at The College of Wooster was invaluable to the development of that trait.