DRIVE DOWN Main St. in Allegany, N.Y., past strip malls and sandwich shops and a never-ending line of steel poles with Buffalo Bills flags dangling from them and you will eventually come upon a piece of local history. The Burton Hotel first opened its doors in the 1930s, a post-prohibition, no-frills bar and grill that suited the blue-collar locals it catered to. Students from nearby St. Bonaventure eventually adopted it, drawn in by the cheap beer in plastic cups and well-seasoned half-pound burgers, banding together each night to sing “Piano Man” after the bartenders announced last call. The relationship proved mutually beneficial: It was Bonnies alumni that saved the Burton in 2019, swooping in to buy the business just before it would have been forced to close. The place stopped operating as a hotel long ago, but its owners still rent out three apartments above the bar. Student-athletes occupy two of them. The world’s most famous NBA reporter lives in the other.
In September, Adrian Wojnarowski announced his retirement from media, abruptly walking away from ESPN (and a $7.3 million annual salary) to return to his alma mater, St. Bonaventure, in the newly created position of general manager of the men’s basketball program (and $75,000 a year). covered it. So did CNN, Fox News and CNBC. On ESPN, the network’s remaining news breakers—Adam Schefter, Pete Thamel and Jeff Passan—hit the airwaves to pay tribute. On social media, millions of followers with alerts set for his posts—Woj bombs, as they became known—fired off some version of the same question:
After all, this wasn’t a job. It was job, the kind sports journalists spend a career working for. Wojnarowski—Woj for the purposes of brevity and character count—did. He sharpened his reporting chops in the ’90s covering Jerry Tarkanian’s dysfunctional Fresno State program for the before spending a decade as a columnist with in New Jersey. In 2007 he pivoted to the NBA beat, first with Yahoo Sports and later ESPN. He’s dined with Kobe Bryant, consulted with owners on coaching hires, done the walk-and-talk—the act of sidling up to a player during his trip from the locker room to his car or the team bus, a reporting technique that if Woj didn’t invent, he most certainly made trendy—more times than he can remember.
He revolutionized what it means to a reporter, harnessing social media to disseminate breaking news to an audience with an insatiable appetite for it. What began as an experiment—“This is your new spot for Adrian Wojnarowski and Johnny Ludden’s breaking NBA news,” read Woj’s maiden tweet the day before the 2009 draft. (Ludden remains at Yahoo Sports, where he is the editor in chief.)—evolved into a platform with a Wembanyama-like reach.
Consider: In August, representatives from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign reached out. They had settled on their nominee for vice president and wanted Woj to break it. Alas, another outlet scooped him before he could.
So why quit? Some of it, Woj says, is easy to explain. There was no conspiracy. He wasn’t forced out. Wasn’t threatened with a pay cut. At 55, he was simply burned out. Insiders are the most well-compensated journalists. But the hours are brutal. Holidays, birthdays, barbecues—all threatened by the pursuit of a transaction. Last year, as a Philadelphia 76ers–Los Angeles Clippers deal involving James Harden came together, Woj decamped overnight in an airport because he was afraid the Wi-Fi on a cross-country flight wouldn’t work. Last summer, he ducked out of a family movie night to break news of Cleveland Cavaliers forward Evan Mobley’s contract extension. His wife, Amy, refers to his phone as a fifth family member. It goes to bed with you. It goes on vacation with you. It’s uninvited … but it’s everywhere you go.
He was ready to walk away. But he wasn’t ready to away. Enter St. Bonaventure, the 166-year-old Franciscan college that sits on a plot of land in upstate New York, sandwiched between Olean and Allegany, 70-ish miles from Buffalo and a lot further from anything else. Notable alums include Hall of Fame center Bob Lanier, Fox anchor Neil Cavuto and Adrian Wojnarowski, class of ’91. Its basketball program has experienced waves of success, from the Lanier-led roster that contended for national titles in the late 1960s to the ’18 team that stunned UCLA to pick up its first NCAA tournament win since then.
For Woj, everything traces back to St. Bonaventure. He arrived on campus in 1987, lured north from his hometown of Bristol, Conn. He met Amy there, connecting over a shared love for basketball, journalism and . On their first date, they argued about the coaching effectiveness of Bobby Knight. He learned the craft in the student newsroom, churning out copy for . Columnists carried the clout in those days, agenda setters like Harvey Araton, Mark Kriegel and Mike Lupica, and Woj aimed to be one of them. A roommate, ticketed for law school, once smirked that a sportswriter would never earn more than $50,000 a year. , thought Woj. “Are you kidding?” he says. “I would have signed a 40-year contract.”
In 2021, the NCAA, after legislation in more than a dozen states opened the door for student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, codified NIL in its rulebook, radically altering the college sports landscape. Collectives, effectively fundraising organizations, quickly formed. To navigate NIL, athletic departments began to staff up, creating new positions—including general manager.
Over the last year Woj spearheaded St. Bonaventure’s search for one. There were challenges. The pay was low and, unless you were an alumnus, living in a town frozen over three months a year wasn’t appealing, either. Last spring Woj began to think: Maybeshould do it. The NBA grind was getting to him. In March, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was already doing most of the job—advising school officials, calling recruits, steering businesses to the Bonnies’ collective, Team Unfurl—so why not take it on full-time? “What I was doing, it just wasn’t fulfilling anymore,” Woj says. “I was just done. This is what gets me excited. To learn something new, to be part of something like this. It’s a whole new challenge.”