Joe Mazur’s departure from ABC11 marks the end of a Triangle sports TV era
Joe Mazur doesn’t know what it’s going to be like signing off for the last time on ABC11 on Wednesday night, other than it will be strange and emotional long before the lights go off and he walks out of the Durham studio. After 21 years as a sports anchor and reporter at WTVD, after a Super Bowl and several Final Fours and a Stanley Cup, he’s leaving the business and moving with his family to Atlanta.
He does know this much already: Viewers will miss him. They’ve made that clear since news broke last week he was leaving.
“I’m a little bit surprised by how many people have reached out to me,” Mazur said. “It’s very humbling. Maybe that’s part of it – (news reporter) Tim Pulliam left the week before my announcement, and maybe people are gravitating toward the last few people who are remaining.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not exactly a new story. It’s only been a little more than a year since his WTVD compatriot Mark Armstrong quit the business to paint houses, and that came not long after Jeff Gravley’s departure from WRAL. Many others have left all four Triangle stations recently, all part of an evolution of local television news that minimizes sports coverage in both airtime and commitment, even in a sports-mad market like the Triangle.
There’s nothing new about that. It’s been happening for years, and will continue to happen, both here and elsewhere. But this is also as close to an endpoint of the previous era as we’re going to get.
Mazur is the last of the truly tenured Triangle sports anchors, the last of the faces that have become familiar over not just years but decades, which makes his departure – like the others, not moving up, but out – a moment when it really does feel like the passing of an era.
Todd Gibson has been a sports reporter at WNCN-17 since 2003, and was at WRAL-5 before that with a gap between, which makes him the market’s flag-bearer now. Spectrum News’ J.B. Ricks started in 2011, at a time when there were decades of experience behind the competition’s anchor desks. And … that’s about it in front of the camera. No one else comes close.
WNCN sports anchor Chris Clark arrived in 2019. Jordan Crammer joined Clark and Gibson last year. WRAL’s Chris Lea started in 2020, and reporters Kacy Hintz and Pat Welter are new as well. Travon Miles, who joined ABC11 as a sports reporter last year, is the only person left there. Mike Toper, who worked alongside Ricks at Spectrum, started in 2017 and left last month.
In a market where sports dominates conversation like few others, where the sports anchors once rubbed shoulders almost as equals with athletes and legendary coaches, outlasting the former and often the latter, that’s an awful lot of new faces – and an awful lot of experience and institutional knowledge no longer walking around or on the air.
Which isn’t to say those new faces, young and old, are subpar in some way. This has always been and will always be the kind of market that attracts talent, both older and younger, and the cream rises fast. Bridget Condon left ABC11 for the NFL Network last year; no one who watched Hintz lug her gear around Manhattan by herself and try to do live shots on 8th Avenue while surrounded by rowdy Rangers fans would question her work ethic or determination.
A decade on from now, Ricks or Clark or Lea or one of the others may become as familiar a face as Mazur and Armstrong and Gravely all became. That, for eons, was the cycle of television life. New faces become old. But unlike their predecessors they’ll have to do it swimming upstream, in a newsroom culture that no longer seems to value the familiarity of those faces.
“Circumstances are different,” Mazur said. “Even the weekend person and the sports-reporter person had a lot of longevity and now those roles are viewed as stepping stones, if they even still exist. You’re certainly not coming here to just do sports anymore. You have to be very versatile and wide-reaching in your ability to tell different stories. I think that’s what helped my longevity. During the pandemic, I was able to pivot and tell quasi-sports stories and straight-up news stories and do that well.”
In Mazur’s case, there was a time when his job would have been too valuable to walk away from under all but the most extreme circumstances. But when his wife Sherrie, the former head of marketing for the V Foundation, was offered a new job in Atlanta, there was no question of the family staying here.
“I don’t want to sound jaded at all,” Mazur said. “Managers will spin it as family opportunities in my case, but the dominoes all have to fall a certain way for that to happen. If things are chugging along and everything is great, then you make other decisions. But the fact is there are probably other opportunities out there that are more appealing at this point.”
So someone who used to read the pages of the Fort Collins Coloradan or Denver Post out loud in the mornings, intoning the latest sports news to his mother as if he were on the air in Denver, will walk away from his dream job.
“I’m sure looking back, if I thought it all out, it would have been a little different,” Mazur said. “I really wanted to do play-by-play and be Bob Costas, but I always loved sports and in particular basketball, college basketball, so to be able to end up in this market and cover Duke and North Carolina and N.C. State all these years, it’s been remarkable. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
This story was originally published June 29, 2022 at 5:10 AM with the headline "Joe Mazur’s departure from ABC11 marks the end of a Triangle sports TV era."
