During his time at St. Joe’s, Brendan Prunty ’06 and the rest of The Hawk Newspaper staff would spend their Wednesday nights in a small room upstairs in Campion Student Center, fueled by pizza as they laid out the weekly paper, sometimes there until 3 a.m.
It was then that Prunty, a sportswriter for The Hawk at the time, first developed his dream of being featured in “The Best American Sports Writing” (now “The Year’s Best Sports Writing”), a dream he would realize a little under 20 years later.
Prunty’s piece, “This gifted clubmaker’s handcrafted driver made him a star. Then it all but derailed him,” was published March 31, 2023, by Golf Magazine. It was later featured in the 2024 edition of “The Year’s Best Sports Writing.”
“When you start out your career, you hope to do something big and impactful and long lasting, but there’s so many talented writers and reporters and outlets that produce so much stuff each year,” Prunty said. “So, to be able to be included, I’m still a little speechless.”
The book is a compilation of 25 or so articles, traditionally long-form features, from throughout the year that are considered the top pieces of sports writing published that year. Prunty’s article was about the last golfer to win a major championship while using a wooden driver.
Although this was Prunty’s first time being featured in the book, it wasn’t the first time he received recognition from the yearly anthology.
While taking a journalism class at St. Joe’s taught by Glen Macnow, former sports talk host on 94 WIP, Prunty was given the assignment of producing an 1800- to 2000-word feature piece.
A New Jersey native, Prunty took an interest in a crumbling stadium in Paterson, New Jersey. After spending a day observing the stadium and its place in the town, Prunty produced “Hinchliffe Stadium Struggling to Preserve Greatness.” He submitted the piece to “The Best American Sports Writing,” and it received an honorable mention, becoming the only article by a college writer to receive recognition in the 2006 edition.
“Being an arrogant college student, [I] was like, ‘Yes, I deserve to submit this,’ and thought nothing of it, and then saw it in the back of the book a couple months later,” Prunty said. “I didn’t really think this was ever a possibility, and then, once you get a taste of something, you want a little more.”
Prunty said the recognition helped hone his desire not just to be a sportswriter, but also to dedicate himself to long-form features, “because those are where you can really dig deep into folks’ personal stories.”
Out of St. Joe’s, Prunty worked for a little under a decade at the Star-Ledger newspaper in New Jersey, followed by a few years freelancing for Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times.
After buying a house and having a child, Prunty said he was looking for something more stable and full-time than freelancing, and went into public relations. Now serving as the vice president of communications for United Entertainment Group for over three years, Prunty still occasionally wrote a few pieces to “keep the muscles active.”
Still, he didn’t think an achievement like this would happen after making the career shift. Until it did.
When Prunty’s friend Alan Bastable, an executive editor at Golf Magazine, asked if he had any freelance article ideas, Prunty referred to a Google Doc of topics. The story of The Wood Brothers, a golf club-making business, was the one that stuck out. He expected it to be a 1,500-word piece, but after starting the reporting process, Prunty knew it would be bigger and would take on a life of its own.
“I just got more and more ensconced into it and just kept digging and reporting, trying to find other people and voices and sources and just really flesh the story out,” Prunty said. “It was kind of like the Zach Galifianakis meme where he’s staring and all the numbers are floating around. You can see the story coming together.”
After receiving positive feedback on the piece, Prunty took a shot and submitted it again. No longer an arrogant college student but instead a long-time sportswriter, he was “stunned” to learn his article was selected to appear in the anthology.
But those who know Prunty, especially the people who knew him from his time at St. Joe’s, weren’t as stunned.
Bradford Pearson ’06 worked with Prunty on The Hawk in the early 2000s. A journalist himself, currently sitting in as the editor-in-chief for Philadelphia Magazine, Pearson sees the same qualities in Prunty today that set him apart nearly two decades ago.
“[Prunty] is a naturally curious person, and he’s a person who pays attention to details, and I think that’s what really sets his stories apart. That’s what sets his stories apart now, as we’re adults, but it set his stories apart when we were 19 and 20 years old, too,” Pearson said. “He understood how to make a story pop, and he understood what needed to go into every story in a way that was remarkable for our age.”
Alexa Bonadonna ’06 has stayed friends with Prunty and his wife, Amanda. Bonadonna said she has seen Prunty’s qualities take form, not just in his professional work but in his personal life as well, especially as the dad of two girls.
“He’s a very disciplined person, who, if he’s going to commit to something, — whether it’s running, whether it’s writing, whether it’s his job — he’s just going to get it done,” Bonadonna said. “He’s always been very clear in that way. If he sets out a goal, he’s going to accomplish it.”
While accomplishing this goal was something Prunty set out to do almost 20 years ago, he said he’s still shocked this dream came true.
“To have something like that happen, so long after when you expected, it still renders me speechless,” Prunty said. “I’m incredibly grateful to the folks at Golf for giving it a shot, and when I filed a story that was 6,600 words, they didn’t immediately kick me out of the building.”
