Late Daily Herald sports writer honored with Mike Spellman Memorial at Arlington

Mike Spellman and Dave Rooney played good cop, bad cop.

Rooney was known for his loud, fiery speeches from the bench.

Spell? He was the big softy.

“Mike would be the calm one, take you after a game is done, put his arm around you and walk out and give you good advice,” Mark Veit said of his former eighth-grade basketball coach at St. Theresa School in Palatine.

Like his Daily Herald sports writing career, Spellman always did his research. He found out what his players were studying, then quizzed them during practices.

Get an answer wrong, and the whole team had to keep running laps. It was that discipline and teamwork that “molded” the teens and won them a championship game in overtime, Veit said.

“It was just a riot,” Rooney said. “Mike and I had more fun with these kids.”

“These kids,” now married with their own, swapped stories of their late coach along with his friends and family before the Mike Spellman Memorial Handicap, the feature, $50,000 race Saturday at Arlington International Racecourse.

“I think Mike touched people in a way that they just — people want to say it over and over again how sorry they are that he's gone,” his brother Neal Spellman said.

His death didn't bring them together. They were already close, thanks to Spellman.

“He really worked at keeping us together,” Rooney said of Spellman, who gathered his buddies, many from his alma mater, St. Viator High School, for an annual golf outing.

Spellman, the Daily Herald's nimble Blackhawks beat reporter, died in January from a heart attack, the day before he would have turned 51. After his namesake race at the track he loved, Spellman's family presented the prize won by 4-year-old filly Cabana.

It was a fitting tribute during Arlington's “Chicago Blackhawks Day,” with coach Joel Quenneville posing for photographs with Spellman's family and friends and offering condolences.

“It kind of combines Mike's love of the track and the love of the Blackhawks, two of his beats with the Herald, all in one,” Neal Spellman said.

Covering horse racing was personal for Spellman, who lived near the track in Arlington Heights for more than two decades. On some mornings, he'd start his day with coffee and a visit to see the horses warm up, said his younger sister Peggy Jacobs.

“Mike had a lot of respect for the people that own horses and train horses, the jockeys,” Neal Spellman said. “It's a tough business.”

And he was a welcoming fixture in the collegial press box, though you couldn't always rely on his picks for placing bets.

“Mike was a great friend and someone you could talk to in confidence,” said Arlington general manager Tony Petrillo. “We wanted to do something, make sure his spirit stays with us all.”

Talking in confidence with his friends, he underestimated his writing skills and never dropped names, Rooney said.

Friendships were “big” with Spellman, and that meant long phone conversations and goofy invites to the golf outing.

“He was the guy that everybody wanted their brother to be, their husband to be and their sons to be,” Rooney said. “I think that's quite a testament.”