Since 1996, Geoff Calkins has been living and working in Memphis writing about sports. Since 2010, Calkins has hosted a show on 92.9 FM ESPN in addition to his regular newspaper contributions. Calkins announced on his show Tuesday that he’s making a shift in what he’ll be covering moving forward with his writing and that he’ll continue to host his show.
“It has absolutely been the best time of my life,” Calkins said. “Memphis has all kinds of problems obviously and challenges. And they feel particularly dire honestly, or urgent I guess now. But my experience is this is where I’ve been my best. This is where I’ve been my happiest. This is where I’ve been my most productive. This place has allowed me to be everything I wanted to be in terms of my career. And it’s also just been incredible as a community for my family.”
“I feel lucky all the time,” he added.
Calkins will be writing more about Memphis overall as a columnist for The Daily Memphian. He made it clear he’s here to stay.
“I’m not leaving Memphis, I’m not leaving The Daily Memphian,” he said. “I’m gonna stop writing about sports and start writing about other stuff to cut to the chase.”
Geoff said the grind of covering sports for almost three decades in Memphis has wore him down. He’s been ready to scale things back a little bit in terms of constantly being on the go.
“It just felt like it was enough, and I didn’t have the same enthusiasm for it that I did,” he said. “And therefore I wasn’t as good at it as I was.”
Calkins got to the heart of why he wanted to write more generally about Memphis. There’s a lot going on in the community he calls home. He felt it was bigger than sports.
But the one thing that’s going to remain constant is his radio show.
“I’m still gonna do a five-day-a-week radio show, and it’s still gonna be mostly about sports,” he said. “That won’t change.”
Geoff mentioned the fact that only being a sports-focused host isn’t how he’s done things over the last few years. He expects listeners won’t notice much of a difference moving forward.
“The radio show’s not going to be going anywhere,” he added.
