Jersey sports loses a gentle giant with Jim Hague's passing

Jim Hague (right) with longtime Associated Press college basketball writer Jim O’Connell. Hague died Sunday morning at the age of 62. (Photo by Jim Hague)

Most of our contemporaries in this industry of ours operate in the shadows. Yet the best among us have a unique gift of making you feel as if you’ve known them forever.

Jim Hague was one of those people.

Unmistakable in his appearance, a tall, rotund man with a robust love for life and blessed with a heart and personality that exceeded his frame, Jim’s wordsmith skills were some of the best the New Jersey sports scene had to offer. And his talent never discriminated. Whether stringing for the Associated Press or Sports Xchange covering the pro teams in the area, or high school football in his native Jersey City, one thing was for sure. If Jim Hague was at your game, you were getting a professional, fair, and balanced chronicle of it in the next edition of whatever publication he represented. As his Twitter profile read for many years, “no job too big or too small. The only thing too big is me.”

Sadly, the only thing too big now is the hole in each of our hearts at the present moment, created by Jim’s passing on Sunday, nine days after he celebrated his 62nd birthday.

A true gentle giant with a dedicated work ethic instilled in him by his mother, Helaine, and a touch of self-deprecating humor to match, Jim was the consummate professional on press row. And no one was ever too insignificant or important for him. Jim was the type who would help you out with your own work and still make his own deadlines, a gentleman of a colleague that is becoming an increasingly rarer breed in today’s world. He wore multiple hats, too. When he wasn’t writing, Jim served as public address announcer at NJIT and Rutgers-Newark basketball games, informing the crowds of what transpired and distinguishing 3-point shots with his trademark call, “score the THREEEEEEEEE” for whoever launched a long-range bomb that found the net. Off the hardwood, he handled official scoring duties for the now-defunct Newark Bears, an experience he and I would recount numerous times over the years after I had once interviewed for the Bears’ then-vacant play-by-play position and come away disillusioned with and somewhat angered by how disorganized and nonchalant the team’s ownership appeared and acted.

As I got to know Jim over the past decade through our coverage of Seton Hall basketball, I learned that he was at one point the sports information director at Saint Peter’s, and he would always share his memories of what was then known as the Yanitelli Center during his time with the Peacocks, where he worked under athletic director Bill Stein and alongside legendary head coaches Ted Fiore and Mike Granelli. Jim was one of the few Los Angeles Rams fans I knew — his Twitter handle, @ogsmar, is “Rams go” spelled backwards — and the story behind that came when none other than Merlin Olsen instructed him at a summer football camp in Pennsylvania as a boy, shortly after Jim’s beloved father, Jack, had passed away.

When NJIT completed its first year as an independent program following the breakup of the Great West Conference nine years ago, I was honored when Jim reached out to me and asked if I would like to run a story on the Highlanders and their plight. It still exists on this site, and I’ll link to it here. As I covered more Pirate games and we grew closer, his commentary on the local sports scene became priceless. His chagrin at his beloved New York Mets underachieving reached a point where he would refer to then-manager Mickey Callaway as “Calladoo,” poking fun at the skipper as only he could.

Jim’s health had taken a turn for the worse in the past few years, his appearances courtside declining as a result. But he remained in good spirits, always finding the positive in his fight and losing 276 pounds at one point. Whenever he would return to the Prudential Center for a Seton Hall game and his mobility made it to where he was unable to walk to the locker room after Kevin Willard’s press conferences, it was my honor to run quotes from the players for him and play them back in the press room so he could incorporate them into his game stories. It was the least I could do for someone who helped make me a better writer without even realizing what he had done. Even after the last time I saw him in person, in 2019 at the Big East tournament when his alma mater Marquette had just finished eviscerating St. John’s, we stayed in touch. I followed his rehabilitation on social media and hoped that, one day, he would return to the press tables a conquering hero. Unfortunately, it never came to pass.

I think now of how Jim and J.P. Pelzman, who left us last July under the same shocking and unexpected circumstances, were two of the first people to welcome me into their inner circle of media on the other side of the Hudson, and how both of them are gone within a year of one another. All of us who knew them are better because of it.

While we try to make sense of this crazy world, it’s not going to be the same without Jim Hague around to narrate it and tell a story that isn’t dumbed down, but at the same time, can be read and enjoyed by people of all ages. And with Father’s Day a week away, I’m hoping he gets to play catch with his dad again on the great field up above.

Rest in power, buddy.