Sun sports columnist Mike Preston turned in his pads and helmet for a notepad and pen

By Karuga Koinange
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

Mike Preston grew up dreaming he would find work through football, but he imagined himself on the field with pads and a helmet rather than on the sideline with a notepad and pen.

The Essex native is a sports columnist for the Baltimore Sun who writes about the Ravens and some college lacrosse teams in Maryland.

Preston said he started playing football at 8 years old after being inspired by watching Baltimore Colts games. He admired iconic players such as Johnny Unitas and Mike Curtis and hoped he could make it to the professional level one day.

“You play for fun, but you always have the dream,” Preston said. “Anyone that has played sports has had the dream of playing in a professional land.”

Preston, 59, grew up as the youngest of five kids. His parents separated when he was in the sixth grade and he lived with his mother. But the separation put his family in a difficult financial situation.

He said there were several nights when they couldn’t eat and many times when they struggled to put gas in the car. Preston found solace through football.

Preston wanted to be a running back but ending up playing on the offensive and defensive lines because of his size. He played recreationally when he was a child, then played in middle school and eventually went on to play at Kenwood High School.

Coming out of Kenwood, Preston was recruited by multiple schools, including Maryland and Penn State. He said he didn’t pursue them because he couldn’t afford to go to those schools. He said he planned to work at a general motors store, but Towson University (then called Towson State) showed interest in him and his mother convinced him to go.

Preston, while earning a degree in Mass Communications, had a solid college career. He started at offensive tackle in his sophomore year and did not relinquish his starting position from then on. He was also voted as a captain in his senior year by his teammates.

“When your peers pick you, that’s special,” Preston said. “It was quite an honor.”

Preston’s recruiting class finished with the best winning percentage of any class in the school’s history. Throughout his college career he was nominated once to the All-American team and earned All-State honors three times.

Despite Preston’s accolades, he was not heavily recruited by NFL teams after graduating in 1981. The San Diego Chargers watched tape of his play, but deemed him too small to make it in the pros.

“I was squatting over 540 pounds, I could bench press 375 [and] I was a strong guy, but they didn’t care about that,” Preston said. “You’ve got to be the prototype.”

Though he was disappointed, Preston refused to give up on his dream of playing professional football. He wrote letters to several NFL teams trying to convince them to take a chance on him, but he got no responses.

He eventually earned a tryout to play with the Montreal Alouettes in the CFL but was released on the final day of cuts. With no agent to find him another opportunity, Preston was forced to give up on his pursuit of a football career.

While he knows he was a bit undersized, Preston said he might have made an impact on a team if given the chance.

“You can’t measure a player’s heart,” Preston said. “I think everybody deserves an opportunity to get a look.”

With his hopes of playing professionally dashed, Preston turned to the only other way he could stay involved in the sport: through reporting.

Preston initially wanted to be DJ or go into radio broadcasting if football didn’t work out. His mentor, Baltimore radio personality Johnny Dark, told him he had a gift for writing, so he pursued journalism. He said his first media job came in his junior year as an intern in the sports department for the Baltimore News-American, primarily taking phone calls and recording score results.

“It was not a glorious job, but I got my foot in the door,” Preston said. “I learned the business from the bottom up, which is a great thing. Nobody wants to do that anymore.”

Following graduation from Towson, he worked at the Essex Times as a sports writer. He said he made very little money but was able to gain experience because writers had to do most of the work themselves. He said he was writing headlines, writing stories and taking photos basically every week.

Preston established a new goal of covering the NFL for a daily newspaper. While at the Essex Times, he worked part-time as a clerk at the Sun for five years. Despite a wealth of experience, Preston had a difficult time getting hired full-time.

He interviewed at the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and several other papers, but got rejected by all of them. He was also rejected by the Sun, even though he had been working there for several years.

“It was kind of like being told you were too short to play football,” Preston said. “My editor told me I wasn’t good enough to work at the Sun, but it wasn’t that I couldn’t write. I just couldn’t get the opportunity.”

He finally got an opportunity to showcase his talent during the 1987 college football season, when Bowie State and McDaniel University had two of the lowest winning percentages in the nation.

The Sun wanted coverage of the losing streaks, but no one would volunteer for the story until Preston decided to step up. After that story, Preston was given the opportunity to be a full-time writer for the paper and he said he felt that his hard work and patience had finally paid off.

“If I didn’t go through those five years with those tough times I don’t think I’d be the person I am today because it made me appreciate life and working my way up,” Preston said.

Preston’s writing style is similar at times to how he was critiqued coming out of school: honest and direct.

“You’ll always know where he stands,” said Chip Diehl, a close friend of Preston’s. “You’ve got to respect that about any person. He doesn’t talk out both sides of his mouth.”

Roseanne Connolly, another close friend of Preston’s, said sometimes Preston uses his platform to motivate athletes, much like how he was driven after being cast off as undersized.

“He reminds me of the bad guy in a wrestling match,” Connolly said. “Sometimes he’ll cross the line to invoke the emotion out of people.”