Farewell frost!
October 30, 2024
J.A. Adande ’92 has been honored with the Curt Gowdy Print Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
A graduate of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, he currently serves as the school’s director of sports journalism and leader of the graduate journalism sports media specialization.
Adande and his fellow 2024 Gowdy Award winners were celebrated Oct. 12 & 13 during the Hall of Fame’s annual enshrinement ceremony in Uncasville, Connecticut.
“I’ve said for a long time that no matter what your interests and skills are there’s a place in the sports world for you,” Adande said. “If you love sports and are good at medicine, law, music or media you can combine them. I never played in the NBA, but I’ve been on the court during an NBA playoff game. That felt like I’d made it.”
The award, named after legendary broadcaster and Hall of Fame president Curt Gowdy, is given to members of the print, electronic and transformative media whose efforts have made a significant contribution to the game of basketball.
> These Northwestern alums are sports media all-stars. Read the story in Northwestern Magazine
Adande is recognized for his contributions as a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and The Washington Post and as a columnist at the Los Angeles Times and ESPN for more than two decades.
Since the mid-1990s, he has covered championship runs by the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. He also has written about an array of sports and major events, including 20 NBA Finals, Super Bowls, the World Series, the Stanley Cup finals, the Olympics, the World Cup, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the Masters. A longtime ESPN contributor, he continues to appear on the network’s “Around the Horn,” for which he has been a panelist since the show’s beginning in 2002.
“Two of the main characters in my Hall of Fame speech were Magic Johnson and Ann Colburn, my ninth-grade English teacher,” he said. “I could never play like Magic Johnson, in part because I could never grow to be 6-foot-9. But I do hope that I can be like Ann Colburn and help set a student on the trajectory to their own Hall of Fame career.”
Adande earned his undergraduate degree in journalism from Medill in 1992. During his time at the school, he was sports editor of student newspaper The Daily Northwestern.
