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Supporting Southern: Robert Parker, '86
Southern honors a trailblazing graduate with a campus space named in recognition of his achievements and lasting support of students.
By Natalie Missakian
ROB PARKER, ’86
Standing on Jess Dow Field at Homecoming last October, Rob Parker, ’86, looked up at the press box bearing his name and thought about a conversation he had with his late mother.
It was 1982 and they were riding a Greyhound bus from New York City to New Haven for a journalism student orientation at Southern. Parker dreamed big dreams of becoming a sportswriter, and his mother warned him it might be tough, since there were so few Black men covering sports at the time.
“She really wanted to make sure I wasn’t setting myself up for a situation where I wouldn’t be able to make it,” he recalls. But once he committed, she backed him 100%.
“If this is really what you want to do, then I’m all the way in,” he remembers her saying.
Turns out, his mother had no reason to worry. Parker, who grew up in Queens, would not only make a living as a sportswriter — he’d go on to work at some of the country’s biggest media outlets, including The New York Daily News, ESPN, and MLB Network, to name a few. Starting as a writer and transitioning to a broadcast analyst, he blazed a trail for other sports journalists of color who followed.
In 1993, he became the first Black sports columnist at The Detroit Free Press, and two years later achieved the same milestone at Newsday. In 2023, he was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. In April, he will be inducted into the Black Sportswriters Hall of Fame.
It all began at Southern, where he honed his journalistic chops at the Southern News, the school newspaper, and then as a student intern at the New Haven Register, WTNH, and WELI radio. He went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
Now living in Los Angeles, Parker co-hosts a national show on Fox Sports Radio and teaches sports journalism at the University of Southern California. He also edits MLBbro.com, a website he launched that covers Black and Brown Major League players.
He remains deeply committed to Southern. In 1990, he established the Rob Parker Award for a standout Southern News sportswriter. He was honored with Southern’s Outstanding Journalism Alumni Award in 2008 and has returned to campus many times to speak.
For Parker, seeing his name immortalized on the press box during Homecoming alongside family, friends, students, alumni, and university leaders gathered for the Oct. 4 dedication, “was just unreal.”
Above all, he hopes the dedication provides inspiration. “It’s about other people — and what you can do to inspire, motivate, and make people feel like they, too, can accomplish things,” he says. He says his story proves that “you can be a young Black man from the inner city, come from a divorced home without wealth, and still achieve.”
“The greatest thing [about the naming] could be that some journalism student looks at that press box, sees a name, and says, ‘Well, who is that? And what did he do?’ And then learns about the path I took from Southern to get to that point,” Parker explains. “That’s what you want to leave behind.”
