By Teresa Walker
twalker@ap.org
A sports writer whose byline usually gets cut off most of the stories he’s written, a sports information director who helped publicize athletes and coaches and also worked to promote the then-Houston Oilers’ relocation to Tennessee and a sports writer who owned his beat so well the team he covered for so many years finally hired him are the 2025 Hall of Fame inductee class for the Tennessee Sports Writers Association.
Clay Bailey has been a fixture covering sports in Memphis with a career spanning decades. Johnny “Ballpark” Franks won multiple awards both for himself and for the athletes and coaches he helped promote at Tennessee State University and others. Jim Wyatt started covering high school sports in his Nashville hometown before becoming The Tennessean’s beat writer for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans from 1999 until the team hired him as a senior writer and editor in 2015.
They will be inducted into the TSWA Hall of Fame in July 2025 as part of the association’s annual awards ceremony.
Bailey's journalism career has spanned decades working at the Memphis Press-Scimitar to The Commercial Appeal and as the first sports editor of The Daily Memphian. While he's never been a staff sports writer, he was sports editor of The Daily Memphian for nearly two years starting with the online news site’s launch in 2018. He has covered every major sporting event in Memphis for nearly 50 years, first for UPI in the 1980s until going to work for The Associated Press in the late 1980s to this day.
He covered every NBA regular season and playoff home game since the arrival of the Grizzlies in Memphis in 2001 – the only reporter to cover the Grizzlies in Memphis regularly since their arrival. NCAA Basketball Tournaments, the Liberty Bowl, University of Memphis men's basketball and football, the PGA Tour, ATP Tour events, Michael Jordan’s minor league baseball appearance, several boxing bouts and some NASCAR races. He covered Larry Finch’s firing as Tigers’ head coach to a female protestor jumping on the court during the Grizzlies’ 2022 playoff series with Minnesota.
During the 2000 Conference USA Tournament, Bailey filed breaking news to AP for the injury that ended Kenyon Martin’s season for No. 1 Cincinnati. Bailey went to the locker room at halftime for an injury update, then went back courtside helping cover the country’s biggest sports story that day.
He has played an integral role in major breaking sports news stories from Memphis, using his news sources to cover everything from coaching hires to conference realignment. Bailey confirmed the body found was that of Memphis legend and former NBA player Lorenzen Wright in 2010.
Franks started as media relations director in October 1986 for the Nashville Sounds through August 1988. He helped create the Sounds’ first record guide researching more than 1,300 box scores.
He served as sports information director for Tennessee State from August 1988 through February 1998, with another stint between April 1999 and 2001. He raised money for all media guides, game programs and other publications and helped first-year TSU women’s coach Teresa Lawrence (now Phillips) win USA Today’s national coach of the year honor for the 1989-90 season.
He also helped promote TSU track star Edith McGuire Duvall for the NCAA’s Silver Anniversary Award in 1991, and she became only the second female to win the award started in 1973 followed by Wyomia Tyus in 1993.
Franks shared the Cal Jacox-Champ Clark Award for the best sports information director from a HBCU for the 1991-92 school year before winning that award for 1994-95 and 1995-96. His 1995 football media guide was named best cover for Division I-AA by CoSIDA.
He won the Society of Professional Journalists’ Journalism Excellence Award in 1997 and also wrote a weekly TSU sports column for several years for the weekly Metropolitan Times. Franks went to work for Fish, Sherwood & Friends in February 1998, working on the then-Tennessee Oilers and TENNFL during the team’s transition to Nashville. He started his own radio show in April 2008 that continues to the present day.
Wyatt is a Nashville native who started working at The Tennessean in 1990 as a part-time prep writer after graduating from Father Ryan High School (1984) and the University of Tennessee (1989). He went full-time in 1997 and served as the high school sports coordinator in 1997 and 1998. Wyatt won first place as ‘Best Prep Writer’ in 1998-99 by the TSWA.
He began covering the Titans in 1999, first with the Tennessean, from 1999 until the summer of 2015. Wyatt was hired by the Tennessee Titans in 2015 and has been the team’s Senior Writer/Editor since.
He is a six-time Tennessee Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association (2003, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013), now known as the National Sports Media Association. The Associated Press Sports Editors twice named him one of the Top 10 beat writers in the country.
He was named ‘Best Event Writer’ by the TSWA in 2004 and ‘Best News Writer’ in 2005. He wrote “Tales from the Titans Sidelines” in 2005. He also has covered 24 straight Super Bowls starting with the Titans’ lone berth in 1999.
