@ZACKCARPENTERBP

BRISTOL - It’s a little past 12:45 on a mid-June afternoon when Adrian Wojnarowski steps out of his Mojave Silver-painted Mercedes-Benz, walks over the narrow parking lot of Bristol Central High School and gazes at the building’s main entrance.

Wojnarowski, 50, has covered the NBA exclusively for the last decade-plus, first for Yahoo Sports and now at ESPN, building a career of constant, almost always accurate scoops that are now social media lore. He’s earned nationwide respect as the most tenacious, competitive, meticulous NBA insider in the business today.

But as he walks into Central’s media center, he re-enters the humble place that created him.

Before the famous breaking news items reverently termed “Woj Bombs,” (a label he actually dislikes, saying he’s never been comfortable with a nickname that always puts “more pressure than I want heaped on me”) …

Before he went global by starting his own NBA show in China called “Woj in the House” …

Before he even came to be known by his colloquial nickname “Woj” by his 3.1 million Twitter followers, NBA stars, ESPN producers, fellow analysts, SportsCenter anchors and everybody outside of his wife and a rare few others …

Before all of that, Adrian Wojnarowski was simply, Adrian, born and raised in Bristol.

But after leaving behind his days as a 1987 Bristol Central High School graduate, he is no longer Adrian. On this day, he walks into a room filled with students, teachers and administrators and immediately transforms into a celebrity, a local living legend.

He’s Woj.

Wojnarowski is back for an awards ceremony for a cause he holds close to his heart, “The Writing Initiative,” a multifaceted program encouraging students to cultivate and harvest their writing skills, provide scholarships, develop educator enrichment programs for those teaching writing at Bristol Central and, perhaps most important, provides an avenue for Gale Dickau, a retired Central teacher, to help students with their college application essays.

When Wojnarowski returned to ESPN in June 2017, he wanted to give back to the school and Dickau, a woman whom he credits for being the one who began his metamorphosis from budding talent to a New York Times best-selling author, the architect of the Yahoo Sports monolith and a two-time national sports writer of the year award winner.

During his sophomore and junior English classes he took with Dickau, Wojnarowski remembers turning in a paper he says wasn’t worthy of having his name on it. She essentially threw it back in his face, telling him, “This is a waste of your time and a waste of my time. You’re better than this. Don’t ever hand in something like this again,” he recalled.

It startled him. But he knew she was right. It was that type of nurturing which helped give Wojnarowski confidence he could make a career of penmanship.

“I don’t know where else I would’ve gotten that confidence,” he says. “She was a huge part of the path I took.”

GIVING BACK

He wanted to find a way to give back to Central and Dickau, so when he signed his five-year contract with ESPN, he worked out a deal with the company under which they agreed to combine to pay a six-figure annual commitment to fund “The Writing Initiative.”

“That’s what I was most excited about [when I came back],” Wojnarowski says. “I love this job and working at ESPN, but I was really excited to get that going, and Mrs. Dickau has done an unbelievable job with her vision. It’s beyond what I ever imagined. Everybody has breathed life into it and given a sense that we can do even more.”

He never forgot how influential she was in his life and he wanted to ensure that would continue for future Rams.

“I’m not curing diseases,” Wojnarowski said. “I’m lucky to get to do what I do. It’s what I always wanted to do. Compared to when I go up to Central and see what Mrs. Dickau does and see the dedication, that’s what inspires me. You always want to find those inspirations in your life. I always get that from them.”

As Dickau stands at the podium before those gathered at the ceremony, she can’t resist bringing up one of her most fond memories from Wojnarowski’s early days.

Dickau’s sophomore English class was assigned to read “A Separate Peace.” In the book, there is a reference to pistons in a car engine, and her students were to write their interpretation of the metaphor. So Wojnarowski, as he was accustomed to do, made a sports reference to Isiah Thomas and Bill Laimbeer of the Detroit Pistons. She couldn’t stop laughing and gave him full credit.

Dickau never sees Wojnarowski as this NBA super reporter or big-time author, though she knows and is proud of the reputation he’s earned. For Dickau, Woj always was and forever will be Adrian.

“He’s always going to be 15 years old in the second row, in the first seat, of my sophomore English class with his knee going a mile a minute with his hand up like, ‘I know this one! I know this one!’” Dickau said. “That’s how I know him best.”

She still looks at him as the constantly upbeat presence that possessed a gift for boosting peoples’ spirits and as the young student truly unaware of his potential, even today as he continues to shoot quick glances back to his phone before finally grabbing it.

He can’t help it anymore.

A source tells him Charlotte Hornets forward Marvin Williams exercised his $15 million player option to return to the team for the 2019-20 season.

Not a monumental piece of information for a player who averaged just 10 points and five rebounds for a non-playoff team, but it’s one of the ridiculous number of scoops, big or small, Wojnarowski is always clamoring to be the first to report.

And he is, sending a quick tweet in the middle of the ceremony, and soon thereafter, he is out of the building, ushering himself back through the heart of the city as he careens toward ESPN Plaza in that slick Mercedes.

RIGHT AT HOME

Even though he seems headed to a completely different world, he still feels right at home because, well, this is home.

This is where he played in little league tournaments as a kid, when longtime Central teacher Dave Greenleaf remembers Wojnarowski’s catcher’s gear being too big for his 9-year-old frame. Yet there he was, typical Adrian, not afraid to get into the dirt to get what the team needed.

This is also where he and his two siblings, Bryan and Brenda, were adopted by two loving parents, Edward and Lillian.

It’s where he can take a six-minute drive to visit Edward, 88, even on a rainy 1:30 a.m. night after a segment on Scott Van Pelt’s late SportsCenter edition and have Edward talk about how awe-inspired young Adrian was at the Bristol Red Sox minor league games the two used to attend together at Muzzy Field.

Here, he can reminisce on the youthful moments that helped shape his own notorious work ethic. Here, he saw the back-breaking hard labor his father busted his butt doing for more than 30 years, sometimes working two jobs, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. as a ball-bearings worker for General Motors at the now-defunct New Departure that was shut down in January 1995.

It’s where he tries to visit his mother’s gravestone every time he comes to town, after she passed away in April 2014. He can sit and reflect with her on the time she got him a card at the Bristol Public Library, an impactful gift allowing him to check out the sports biographies he loved so much and plow through them in a day or two.

Here, he can think back to the times when he first knew he wanted to be a sportswriter at 11 years old, watching the Big East basketball game of the week, sometimes with one of his favorites, Patrick Ewing, tearing through UConn, and writing game stories with a pencil and a piece of paper atop wooden TV trays, and Lillian would take the articles and post them on the family fridge.

This is the city where the memories flood back to him of watching Brenda as a majorette, twirling her baton at football games, or where he saw his older brother as another source of inspiration, as Bryan began his dream of working on cars at an early age, and parlayed that into becoming a mechanic at B&D Automotive, showing Adrian there’s no reason to wait around to start doing what you love.

He hasn’t forgotten his origin days as he pulls into the plaza, still stunned this 16-building, 950,000-square-foot complex that houses more than 4,000 employees is actually his office.

“I remember seeing Bob Ley at the gas station when I was a kid,” Wojnarowski says of the company’s longest-tenured anchor/reporter that has been with ESPN since its inaugural 1979 season and just this past Wednesday announced his retirement. “I remember seeing him fill up at a gas station, and then I come to ESPN and his office is right by mine. I’d see him, and I’d still feel like I’m the kid watching him pump gas. It’s surreal.”

‘I FEEL LIKE I REPRESENT BRISTOL’

Wojnarowski steps into the pre-production meeting of an NBA Mock Draft special that he, Jay Williams, Bobby Marks, Mike Schmitz and Laura Rutledge are taping later that day, run by producer Geoff Brown.

It’s a precursor to a night that comes more than a week later, when Wojnarowski gets to use his two greatest talents at the draft, rigor and relationships. Those are the main “secrets” to how he drops those Woj Bombs, including three of his biggest of the past six weeks:

-Michigan men’s basketball head coach John Beilein hired as Cleveland Cavaliers head coach

-Warriors star guard Klay Thompson’s torn ACL in Game 6 of the NBA Finals

-Pelicans all-world forward Anthony Davis traded to the Los Angeles Lakers

All three mic drops, and nearly every draft night tweet he later dishes out, are born out of at least 70-100 phone calls per story over many months and relationships that date back several years, decades with the Beilein news and at least 10 years with the Thompson nugget.

“You have to put in a tremendous amount of time in the legwork of your reporting,” Wojnarowski says. “The minute you think you can shortcut it, you’ll get embarrassed. ... But you sort of have to work at it the same every single day.”

This particular day was no exception, with Wojnarowski already having helped break the news of Kevin Durant’s torn Achilles, and he still has work to do.

After Wojnarowski quips about Larry Bird’s brother, Eddie, being the better Bird brother, sarcastically jokes Zion Williamson is better than both Bird and Magic Johnson, and after relaying to his colleagues the Buzz Lightyear ride is “pound for pound the best ride at Disney,” the show’s five stars leave to step in front of the cameras.

Before they do, Brown makes sure to remind each one what the hour-long segment is all about. Marks and Schmitz are making the selections based on who they believe each team’s NBA general manager would select in those positions, and Williams makes the analysis of the players.

Wojnarowski is there to drop his prognostications about the business side of each selection, the trade talks that would occur and impacts they would have on the free agent market.

“We’re living in fantasy land,” Brown says of the show. “Woj, you’re living in reality.”

“I’m going to switch places with you guys one of these days,” Wojnarowski retorts.

But he doesn’t have to. He isn’t living in reality. He is living in fantasy land.

He still can’t believe he has this job.

Wojnarowski spent his younger years as a grass mower at Bristol cemeteries, a worker in the men’s clothing and shoes departments at Sage-Allen, as an employee stuffed inside a cramped, sweaty Fotomat in the parking lot of a shopping center and looking like a cartoon character holding a giant floor buffer with his small arms as a custodian at Northeast Middle School, where he spent his mornings scraping the gum off the undercarriage of desks with a thin razor blade.

He admits he wasn’t good fixing things with his hands. His dad and brother are the incredibly gifted ones in that area, but Adrian didn’t get those genes.

“Ask my wife how I am around the house,” he says.

He admits to being “useless” as a physical laborer, and that’s part of what makes him so appreciative of the work he does now. It’s why he doesn’t mind sometimes working 18- or 19-hour days, like the 6:15 a.m. to 2 a.m. shift the night before, to do a fake job.

And he always downplays the whole lack-of-sleep thing because, “I’ve worked real jobs. This isn’t one of them,” he says. “It’s not exactly work at the coal mines. It pales in comparison to people who have to work two jobs to support a family. I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do what I love to do. I try not to lose that edge.”

He pauses, looks at his iPhone, entering “The Woj Matrix,” a phrase lovingly bestowed on him by Williams, for the instances in which he hits those across from him with a series of “uhhs,” “umms” and 10-second pauses as he sinks into the abyss of the NBA underground’s most wow-inducing stories. Or, the more important texts, from his wife, Amy, or one of his kids, Anna or Ben.

As he almost always does, he puts his phone down and continues from where the conversation left off: “I fully expect, I wait every day, for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘It’s over.’ They will. That will happen. But hopefully not today.”

All of this, his entire beautifully chaotic world, almost always circles back to one thing Wojnarowski continues to douse with endless credit … the city of Bristol. His friends, his family, his teachers at Central and the Boys and Girls Club are what made him. This was the foundation that helped him develop his dozens of sources.

“Those places shaped me,” he says. “I have a responsibility to help, if I can, open up some doors there and provide some opportunities. When we’ve had events with families, it’s the classmates of mine who have their kids in [The Writing Initiative]. I played sports with the dads or went to school with the moms of some of our scholarship winners. I feel connected to them.

“I’m just a good example of what this town is about. I grew up lower-middle class with a blue-collar family and had so many people help me along the way. I feel like I represent Bristol. There’s a great sense of pride here, and I have tremendous pride here. If you talk to people around ESPN, you’re not going to diss Bristol around me. People know that you’re going to hear about it if you try it. I’m proud to be here, and I’m proud to be from here.”

That’s why he was humbled … floored … as he reached back and grabbed a memory he still holds dear, from his first day back in town as an ESPN employee.

June 30, 2017: Wojnarowski is walking across the ESPN campus when a security guard stops him. He opens his mouth to speak, and what comes out still mesmerizes Adrian.

“Thank you for coming back.”

Zack Carpenter can be reached at (860) 973-1811 or zcarpenter@bristolpress.com