Telegraph editor who oversaw Pulitzer-winning probe of college sports, academics dies

Richard D. “Rick” Thomas, a Macon-raised newsman who in the mid-1970s became one of The Telegraph’s youngest-ever city editors and who a decade later as chief editor oversaw the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning examination of collegiate sports and academics, died Friday. He was 67.

After Thomas was named executive editor in 1983, he helped lead The Telegraph’s merger with the old Macon News.

Thomas, a native of Hogansville in west Georgia, graduated from Lanier High School in Macon and Mercer University.

Before joining the Telegraph, he worked as a radio reporter for WBML and WMAZ. In 1973, while still a student at Mercer, Thomas became a staff writer for The Telegraph, covering courts, crime and car wrecks.

By the end of that year, a couple of months after turning 24, he was tapped to be the paper’s city editor, directing local news coverage.

Thomas began his career against the backdrop of Richard Nixon’s presidency, a time when journalists were sinking their teeth into corruption and other malfeasance.

During his stint as a reporter, Thomas wrote about, among other things, the moonshining trial of a former congressional candidate accused of running a whiskey still in Houston County.

Newspapers of the era were also rife with far less sobering dispatches — ones about UFOs.

In September 1973, Thomas chronicled a Saturday night when nearly two dozen reports of hovering, diamond-shaped lights were spotted across the region.

For an item in the next morning’s paper, Thomas quoted a police dispatcher who said reports of flying saucers had come in “from Bloomfield, west Macon, east Macon, north Macon. They came from everywhere. We even had one call saying one of them had landed.”

Thomas wrote that cops and firefighters watched “the flickering phenomena” over Willingham Field near Central High and another that whooshed over the Coliseum.

Under his leadership as executive editor in the ’80s and on into middle ’90s, The Telegraph’s Sunday circulation topped 100,000 for the first time.

In 1985, two years after Thomas was named top editor, the paper won its only Pulitzer to date for a series of articles that probed the disparities of athletics and academics at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech.

After the Pulitzer win, Thomas, who for years wrote a regular column on the opinion page, suggested that players in big-time college sports be paid for their services. He even called out a legendary football coach.

“Education,” he wrote, “certainly doesn’t seem to be the top priority of athletes in major college sports. ... Vince Dooley can scoff all he wants, but there’s no denying the facts — that graduation rates for athletes in the major sports at Georgia are dismal. ... When their years of eligibility are up, those players — the vast majority ... have an academic background that maybe prepares them for sweeping out the back room of a convenience store.”

Thomas was known to reporters for his occasional “green grams,” notes he initialed with a green, felt-tipped pen and left on their desks or in their mail slots as a way of saying “good job” for stories they’d written.

When he stepped down as editor in 1996 to start a communications consulting business, Thomas, then 46, told reporters assembled at the paper’s Broadway office that his 13 years at the newsroom’s helm had been “richly rewarding.”

This story was originally published August 4, 2017 at 4:53 PM with the headline "Telegraph editor who oversaw Pulitzer-winning probe of college sports, academics dies."