John Clayton, the veteran N.F.L. reporter nicknamed the Professor who was noted for his football analysis and his concise game recaps for ESPN, died on Friday at a hospital in Bellevue, Wash. He was 67.
His death was announced in a statement from the Seattle Seahawks, who did not specify the cause. He worked in the final part of his career as a sideline reporter for the team’s radio network.
Mr. Clayton’s journalism career spanned five decades, taking him from the pages of The Pittsburgh Press, where he covered the Steelers in the 1970s as a teenager, to the studios of ESPN, where he became a fixture.
Mr. Clayton, who wore rimless glasses and had a crisp delivery, was known for his substantive reporting rather than a flashy, attention-getting on-air style.
“He brought an even-handedness and a fairness and a voice of reason to reports at a time when the kind of bombastic debate shows and less substantive, more entertaining forms of programming were becoming more popular,” said Mike Sando, a senior writer for The Athletic who was friends with Mr. Clayton for decades.
Mr. Clayton often joked that he “didn’t look like a TV guy,” Mr. Sando said, and told his friends that, in contrast to his more dashing television colleagues, he had kept the same haircut for more than 40 years.
Of his look, Mr. Clayton told The New York Times in 2013, “I mean, you are what you are.”
When he was 17, he got a job with The Pittsburgh Press covering the Steelers when they were on the precipice of becoming a championship dynasty.
He would go into the locker room, interview players and coaches and then return home, forgoing the beer that his colleagues would enjoy afterward in the press box.
In 1978, he wrote an article revealing that the Steelers had violated N.F.L. rules when their players used shoulder pads during a minicamp practice — a revelation that he called Shouldergate and that resulted in the team’s losing a third-round draft pick.
Mr. Clayton left The Press in 1986 for The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., where he met his future wife, Pat, a sports reporter who covered bowling.
At The News Tribune, he pioneered ways of covering the N.F.L., such as maintaining spreadsheets that tracked every player’s salary after the league introduced salary caps in 1994; calling all 32 teams every Friday to find out who had not attended practice; and contacting every stadium on game days to learn who the inactive players would be.
“John pioneered the granular way in which the league is covered today,” Mr. Sando said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Clayton is survived by a sister, Amy.
John Clayton was born on May 11, 1954, in Braddock, Pa., about 10 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. His obsession with football began when he was a child and his mother took him to Steelers games.
“Of course you can see my body — you can see I didn’t have the ability to compete on the football field,” he told USA Football in 2013. “It just wasn’t there. But I loved the game so much.”
He embarked on his journalism career after graduating from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1976.
In 1995 he joined ESPN, where he appeared on weekly radio shows and hosted the “Four Downs” segment with Sean Salisbury, a former N.F.L. quarterback.
But his television stardom was not solidified until his appearance in what would become a memorable “This is ‘SportsCenter’” commercial.
In the ad, an anchor says: “It’s hard to find an expert more dedicated than John Clayton. He’s the consummate pro.”
The scene shows Mr. Clayton delivering his analysis on the air in a suit jacket and a tie and cuts away to reveal that he is wearing just the upper portions of both. He pulls the garments off to reveal that he’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with the name of the thrash metal band Slayer.
Then he stands up in a room plastered with posters, and lets loose a hidden ponytail.
He jumps on a bed, yelling: “Hey, mom! I’m done with my segment!” He then eats noodles from a takeout container.
Although the ad was a success, Mr. Clayton, had been hesitant to do it, said Dave Pearson, the chief communications officer for the Seattle Seahawks.
Mr. Clayton told Mr. Pearson and Mr. Sando that he had built his reputation on serious reporting and did not want to tarnish that by appearing in a silly ad.
“Are they going to laugh at me?” Mr. Sando recalled Mr. Clayton asking.
But after it aired, Mr. Sando said, it gave Mr. Clayton “a new level of celebrity that was totally unexpected,” and he cherished that,
Mr. Clayton’s career at ESPN ended in 2017 when he was one of several people laid off by the network, according to The Sporting News.
He joined the radio station Seattle Sports 710 and worked for five seasons as a sideline reporter for the Seattle Seahawks Radio Network. This month, Mr. Clayton was reporting on the quarterback Russell Wilson’s expected trade to Denver. (He was traded last week.)
When asked by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2018 how long he planned to work, Mr. Clayton replied: “Until they plant me, I guess. I love this stuff.”
Ed Bouchette, a former sports reporter for The Post-Gazette who is now a senior writer with The Athletic, said Mr. Clayton had been even more devoted to his wife, who has multiple sclerosis. He had an elevator built for her in their house and took her to Super Bowl games that he covered, Mr. Bouchette said.
“She was in a wheelchair, and John would take her around everywhere,” he said. “It was kind of touching, I thought.”
In 2007, he received the Bill Nunn Memorial Award, one of the highest honors for football reporters.
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