Dick Weiss is an award-winning sportswriter and columnist for the New York Daily News who grew up in Drexel Hill, attending Big 5 college basketball doubleheaders at the Palestra. He has been writing about his favorite sport for the past 41 years. His nickname is ”Hoops.”
At Temple, he was the sports editor of The Temple News for two years, the sports editor of the school yearbook, an analyst for Temple football on the student radio station WRTI and had a brief stint as a soccer goalie in 1967 on an NCAA tournament team. He worked for both the Baltimore Sun and the Trenton Times for the first year of his professional career before moving to the Courier-Post. Weiss joined the Philadelphia Daily News in 1973, where he worked for 20 years, covering college sports and the NBA.
He left to cover national college football and basketball for the New York Daily News in 1993. He has covered 40 NCAA Final Fours and 27 national championship games in college football and has been a contributor to every major basketball publication in the country. Weiss has been a voter in the AP basketball poll for the past 30 years.
In 1998, Weiss became the youngest recipient of the Curt Gowdy Print Media Award, presented to the journalist who has achieved excellence in his field. He has also received the BIG EAST media award and the NIT media award. He was named the 2000 Jim Murray Outstanding Sportswriter by the All American Football Foundation and was given the Frank Queen Award by the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.
A past president of the United States Basketball Writers Association (1994), he was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2004, he served as the president of the Football Writers Association of America.
Weiss, who has co-authored several books, met his wife Joan, a Temple graduate who he still considers to be the best editor with whom he has ever worked, in college. They had their first date in 1966 at a Big 5 doubleheader.