How valuable was Cindy Robinson to a sports section?

Well, I hired her five times, if that gives you any indication. Yes. Five. In violation of Gannett corporate policy at least a couple of times. (You get two bites of the apple in Gannett, unless you get special dispensation.)

As far as I was concerned? When you can hire a bulldog reporter (and then get her back, back, back and back) … you do it.

Cindy always was the sort of journalist an editor could point toward a story, turn her loose and wait for the good stuff to come back. She had short-comings on the grammar side of things, and she needed help with story organization, but when it came down to someone who could get comparative strangers to tell a journalist information that really was not in their best interests to be divulging … well, you’ve got a very valuable asset on your hands.

That was Cindy Robinson. All five times I hired her.

She was Cindy Gross the first time she came to the paper, in 1980. I had just been promoted to sports editor, we had a couple of vacancies, and the paper really wanted to bring another woman into the sports department.

I interviewed Cindy and another woman (who still is working in the L.A. market, by the way). Both were qualified, but Cindy had a certain spark that made her different. A sort of personal energy that was easy to feel. When she entered a room, you knew it. A life force had just come in, and even dullards could sense it.

(It also mattered that she had covered the Angels while working for a little paper in San Clemente. And any woman from that era who could survive a baseball clubhouse had some moxie, for sure.)
To recap, quickly, the five times she worked for me.

1980-81. She left after she got married, to a guy she met in Las Vegas (and is still married to, amazingly), and moved to Oregon.

1989-91: Came back to the biz after two daughters went off to school; left after the birth of her son.

1993: Back again, soon off to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, which offered her full-time status and more money.

1996: After a messy split from San Gabriel, came back briefly. Decided she could make more money doing things other than working part-time for us.

2000-02: The final go-round, as a 30-hour-per-week part-timer. By now, MediaNews owned us, so the fact that she had left the paper four times previously didn’t matter.

Now that I think of it, the five times Cindy worked for us … probably covered not much more than 6-7 years, on aggregate, over a two-decade span. I’m thinking that doesn’t happen often in journalism.

Anyway, I am pegging Cindy to 1989 for one reason: That is the year she did the story that got her national attention.

At the time, she had the “local colleges” beat. Covering Cal State San Bernardino, the University of Redlands and the local junior colleges.

One of the latter was San Bernardino Valley College, and late in the 1989 baseball season she caught wind of a rumor that the team’s star player might be ineligible. My recollection is that we had done a feature story on the guy, Don Johnson, earlier in the season. About how he had come to town because his wife was going to school in the area, and how he decided to take up baseball again after some sort of layoff.

If the guy were, in fact, ineligible, that was going to be huge because he clearly was the best player on a good team that didn’t have much hitting, aside from his. The school might have to forfeit a bunch of victories.

So, we put Cindy on the case. A job made more difficult by what I recall as some sort of specific time constraint, as well. Such as playoffs beginning in a day or so.

Within a day, maybe two, Cindy had discovered that Don Johnson was living a lie. He had played professional baseball in Oregon in the Single-A Northwest League, and Cindy had a local coach who identified him from those times. He was 26 or 27 years old and had hidden the truth about his professional past from his young teammates. Cindy ultimately confronted him on his way to church, getting his sad and ultimately ridiculous spin on events before he, basically, disappeared from history.

She came back to the office with mounds of material. Sources, secondary-sources, records, phone numbers of everyone … and she banged out a major piece to which we gave big display and lots of space. The tale of a guy who loved baseball so much, who was so loathe to let it go that he created this fiction so he could go back and start his career over. It was a story chock-full of hard, damning facts, but one that also hinted at a sort of sympathy, allowing the reader to understand why Don Johnson did what he did, if not quite to excuse him. It was an excellent piece of journalism.

San Bernardino Valley College was booted out of the playoffs, the L.A. Times rewrote Cindy’s story and published it, and that version of events was picked up by the Associated Press.

The following February Cindy, finished fifth in the annual Associated Press Sports Editors awards, either in the Enterprise or Investigative Reporting categories, for the Don Johnson story. This was a big deal, because the APSE contest is the only one that really matters in print sports journalism.

By no means was this Cindy’s only big investigative piece. She dug up malfeasance in the Cal State SB women’s basketball program, and bad acting by the athletic director there. She ferreted out the facts of a softball program rent by tension and jealousy generated by a coach who sought sexual relationships with her players.

How she got people to tell her what they did … I mean, I knew, but I never really understood. If Cindy Robinson showed up at your office with a pad and a pen and a big smile … well, some wrong-doing in your past was about to be exposed, and you ought to run like hell.

In a perfect world, we would have had Cindy doing investigate stuff all the time. That was where her personal skills, her doggedness, her ability to connect the dots and think almost like a private detective, were supremely valuable.

But the reality was, she spent most of her time on the traditional stuff. Game stories, previews, features, a weekly column. She was competent at all that, better than competent, but in those arenas her weak points as a journalist loomed. Her inventive spelling. Her issues with story organization and sentence construction. Editing her wasn’t just a matter of spell-checking and slapping a hed on top. Our best copy editor would heave a deep sigh every Monday night as he plunged into a 30-plus-inches notes column, and only after an hour or two (and probably several calls to an increasingly agitated Cindy) would he be finished.

Bottom line, though, she was a major asset to the section.

She was popular with co-workers, eager, avid and dedicated to all the best parts of journalism, the romantic parts — shining a light into dark places, exposing malfeasance, giving attention to those who played and won fairly.

Sources loved her, when they had nothing to hide. She was genuinely interested in you and your team; her love of people is perhaps her defining characteristic, and one that stood out in a profession so often populated by crabby and cynical misanthropes.

I must concede that her fifth, and final, stint with The Sun ended unpleasantly. The only one that did. It was the spring of 2002, and the Cal State San Bernardino basketball team that had been ranked No. 1 in the country in Division II had won the NCAA West Region title and was going to Evansville, Ind., for what D2 calls the Elite Eight.

It was a Sunday. I was on the phone with the editor. Can we send two people to Evansville? Cindy and me? She will do the game stories, I will write columns. We were thinking San Bernardino could win its first NCAA team title. The editor said, no, we can send only one person.

I should have said, OK, then Cindy will go. But on a selfish level, for both me and the section, I was thinking that I could go and write columns AND generate the basic beat coverage. Cindy wasn’t a Page 1 columnist.

So I kicked it back to the editor. OK, if one person goes, I said, whom should it be? “You,” the editor said.

I called Cindy. I told her the editor’s decision. She was extremely unhappy, to say the least. Within moments, she asked me where I would like her letter of resignation to go.

We didn’t talk for half a year. Maybe more. But eventually there was a detente. I can’t say she ever has forgiven me, and I can’t say I honestly believe I need to ask for forgiveness. So we don’t talk about it. I know what she thinks; she knows what I think. We have been friends too long before, and since, to let it get in the way.

“These things always have a way of working out” is what we often hear, after some change in job status. And I believe it did, for Cindy.

She was already coaching water polo at Norco High School, I believe, but she went into it with new energy, after her last formal stint in print journalism. Coaching both boys and girls, winning league titles, doing some damage in the CIF playoffs. She also coached both the boys and girls swim teams, channeling her considerable energy (and considerable knowledge of all things aquatic) into coaching.

(Don’t get her started on world-class swimming; she may not stop talking for an hour, she loves it so.)

Also, we were about to enter a phase in journalism history in which the form of reporting she excelled at — long-form investigative pieces — was being marginalized. Newspapers didn’t have the news hole or the manpower or, soon, the First Amendment urge to chase down difficult, complex stories. It was increasingly about byline count and short, punchy (and numerous) stories. If Cindy were still in sports journalism, she would have to do her digging on her own time, then beg for the space to lay out the facts. It would be difficult.

Cindy continues to coach, and she is well-known within the community — the impossibly tanned little woman with the impossibly white teeth who bustles around the pool deck. Her son, Mikey, is one of the top water polo players in the Inland Empire, even as a sophomore. She intends to coach until he graduates, then Norco will have to find someone else to run all its aquatics programs for, basically, free.

Cindy will remain one of the best reporters in the history of The Sun sports section.

Someone good enough that she would be worth hiring a sixth time.