Phil Kosin
Phil Kosin (born August, 1950, died August 10, 2009) was an American journalist, columnist, radio host, commentator, blogger and newspaper publisher from Chicago. From 1989 until his death, he served as editor and publisher of the Chicagoland Golf newspaper.
He also hosted since 1992 the seasonal Chicagoland Golf Show, a talk radio program on CBS Radio-owned WSCR SportsRadio 670 in Chicago, a 50,000-watt clear channel.
Kosin also appeared frequently at Chicagoland Golf's Chicagoland Golf.com website and his blog "Phil Kosin's Worm Castings"
In 1995 Kosin founded the Illinois Women's Open state championship of golf and served as tournament director.
Kosin has served as a consultant to many golf courses. An experienced photographer, he always made the photographs for articles he wrote.
Kosin died on August 10, 2009, after a four-year battle with cancer.
[edit] Career
Kosin began covering sports at his high school at age 14 for City News Bureau and two competing local newspapers, getting bylines in each and earning himself the princely sum of $32.50 a week. He did this even though he played on some of those teams and had to figure out how to balance being honest in his stories and coexisting with his coaches and teammates.
He continued to write part-time for both local newspapers and freelanced stories to magazines through his college years. He worked full-time in the production department on the third shift at a Chicago daily newspaper while attending junior college, then majored in broadcasting and journalism at Western Illinois University.
He reported on all Chicago sports and teams from 1980 through 1988 while hosting weeknight “magazine” shows on two radio stations, WTAQ and WMRO, which covered all of the Chicago market under the banner “The Sportsweek Radio Network”. His magazine shows consisting of lengthy interviews and multiple-guest discussions was a first on Chicago radio, pre-dating by three years other shows which make the same claim. He served as midwest writer for Boxing Digest and also was hired by Eddie Einhorn to be a boxing analyst, teamed with Al Bernstein on bi-weekly telecasts. They did the first-ever broadcast on the SportsVision pay-TV channel in 1982.
At that time he also wrote syndicated semi-weekly newspaper columns in addition to stringing for The Associated Press at major sporting events. He pioneered on Chicago radio the concept of moving the sports talk show and its guests out of the studio and before a live audience at sports bars. In the early 1980s he hosted a Sunday night show, “Inside Baseball”, co-hosted in alternate weeks by Chicago White Sox manager Tony LaRussa and Chicago Cubs manager Lee Elia, depending on which team was in town.
Kosin covered golf since the 1975 Western Open, where he gathered quotes and did sidebars for The AP under the tutelage of legendary AP sports editor Joe Mooshil. Kosin covered 32 straight Westerns (until its contentious demise in 2006) and more than 500 golf tournaments, including nearly 60 major championships. His work has appeared in Golf Digest, Sports Illustrated, Golf Traveler, American Bar Association Journal and the first resuscitation of Golf Illustrated.
After freelancing for several marginally-successful regional golf publications for many years, he became editor of Illinois Golfer in 1986. Three years later, in 1989, Kosin finally struck out on his own and founded Chicagoland Golf. Since then it has become the longest-running golf publication in Chicago history.
He also started a non-profit in 1992, The Chicago Friends of Golf, Inc., which has provided financial assistance to needy junior golf programs and wherever else needed. In its ”Used Clubs for Kids” program from 1993 through 2006, The Chicago Friends of Golf, inc., collected from readers and redistributed free to needy juniors and junior programs over 50,000 clubs, 3,500 golf bags, 900 pairs of golf shoes, and over 200,000 golf balls.
In 1993, Kosin wrote an article conceptualizing a golf school limited to beginner adults, and came up with the name "No Embarrassment Golf School" to describe it. The model and the name were first used by Jemsek golf courses in the Chicago area to great success and are now being used nationally, rights-free, as Kosin desired.
Kosin was a longtime member of the Golf Digest Top 100 Ranking Panel. Until his death, he was the only original member on the Illinois Golf Hall of Fame Nominating Committee (1989). He was listed as an Advisory Board member of Illinois' "Hook a Kid on Golf". Always a public golfer, the only club he was a member of, he joked, was "Sam's Club".
“Phil Kosin’s Chicagoland Golf Show” was on the air on powerful stations in the nation’s third-largest media market since 1994. After three years on WMVP-AM1000 (now ESPN Radio), for the last 13 seasons he hosted a Saturday morning, two-hour weekend show from March through September on WSCR TheScore, SportsRadio 670AM in Chicago – a 50,000-watt, CBS-owned clear channel that reaches 38 states and four Canadian provinces – in addition to being streamed live on the Internet at www.670thescore.com. The Score is also the flagship station for the Chicago White Sox baseball club.[1]
