Joe Falls, 76; Detroit Sportswriter Is in Baseball Hall of Fame

Joe Falls, 76, a longtime sportswriter for the Detroit News and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, died Wednesday of heart failure.

Falls covered 50 World Series, 20 Kentucky Derbys, 15 Super Bowls, 20 Masters and U.S. Open golf tournaments and 25 Indy 500s.

He began his journalism career in 1945, as a copy boy in the New York office of Associated Press. He transferred to the Detroit bureau in 1953 and joined the Detroit Times in 1956.

When the Times folded in 1960, Falls moved on to the Detroit Free Press, eventually becoming the newspaper’s sports editor. In 1978, he joined the staff of the News.

In 2002, Falls was inducted into the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. After the ceremony, Falls said about his career: “You can’t do something that long and not have deep feelings about it.”