The “Guru of Basketball visited UNI on Thursday.

Bob Ryan, a former sportswriter for the Boston Globe and associate of the sports show “Around the Horn,” produced by ESPN, came to speak at UNI’s McLeod Center on Thursday, Jan. 25, to discuss his career.

After 44 years working in sports writing, Ryan announced that he would be retiring from the Globe after the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Ryan, who came to UNI as part of the Hearst Lecture Series, discussed his previous career in sports writing and how it all began. He said when he was younger, he would read about games after attending them, which sparked his interest in a career as a sportswriter.

“If you ask me how to be a writer, the answer is read. I still think reading is the key because you want to be a person of words,” Ryan said. “You’ve got to be a person who can marshal your thoughts. You’ve got to have access to instant information.”

Ryan recalled that his father accepted a new job as an assistant athletic director when he was only six years old. As a result, he began attending games from a young age.

During the lecture, Ryan said that he began counting how many college basketball venues he has been to and is now up to number 194.

He explained that his entire life has always been about sports, so it made sense to make a career out of it. He went on to emphasize his roots as a writer despite spending the majority of his career in television.

“I’m well aware that outside the city of Boston, anybody under the age of 50 probably […] identifies me as a TV person, and that’s fine,” Ryan said. “I’m very proud of my association with ESPN and also local television; it’s had a tremendous impact on my life, but when I look in the mirror in the morning, I see a writer. I’m a writer.”

After his lecture, Ryan took questions from the audience. He answered some as simple as “What’s your favorite sports movie?” to questions as challenging as “What are your opinions on the kneeling movement started by Colin Kaepernick?”

Ryan discussed the latter question at length during the Q&A session, stressing Kaepernick’s intentions behind the protest.

“What Colin Kaepernick did was protest about a very specific thing: the killing of young black men by policemen and society’s refusal to come to grips with it,” Ryan said. “It had nothing to do with the national anthem, had nothing to do with respect or disrespect to the military, nothing. And it was hijacked by other people for their own purposes. Meanwhile, he’s the innocent victim of all this without a job that he should have.”

A few years after his retirement, Ryan launched a podcast in March of 2017 called “Bob Ryan’s Boston Podcast,” where he interviews many professional Boston athletes, as well as local and national sportswriters.

On his podcast, Ryan also discusses what is current in sports, his past career in the sports world and the memories and relationships he built because of it.  

Connor Corcoran, a sophomore at UNI who is currently studying business, attended the Bob Ryan lecture to hear about his life as an avid sports fan and the career he made out of it.

“I’m a huge sports fan. Actually, my whole family is, so it was really interesting to hear from Bob Ryan himself,” Corcoran said. “The lecture was very informative. It was great to hear how he got into the industry. He really does know a lot about everything that involves sports.”

Another attendee, Keith Kennedy, who is a media services manager, came to Bob Ryan’s lecture to film it for UNI TV.

“It was very interesting because I didn’t know about Ryan. I had never heard of him,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t exactly know what to expect, but he has so much knowledge. It’s absolutely amazing. You could ask him just about anything, and he knows something about it, and I think that’s awesome.”