A Reporter’s Journey From Covering Sports to Tires With Don Detore of Tire Business

Episode 103

Don Detore

Tire Business

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Don Detore is the Editor of Tire Business, an industry trade magazine published by Crain Communications. Before this, he began his tenure at Rubber & Plastics News in March 2013 as a copy editor and was later promoted to managing editor. With over 35 years in journalism, Don has held significant roles at The Repository in Canton, including sports editor, managing editor, and executive editor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in communication arts from Walsh University.

In this episode…

When you grow up as a sports fan and eventually become a sports reporter — getting paid to cover historic NFL games, including all-time great basketball players like LeBron James — could you possibly enjoy a job where you write about tires?

According to Don Detore, who spent over 25 years covering sports for Ohio newspapers before transitioning to writing for tire industry publications, the answer is a definite “yes.” Since changing direction, Don says he has immersed himself in the industry and fallen in love with it. According to Don, covering the tire industry is fun, interesting, and entertaining mainly because of his relationships with people who have become friends for life.

On this episode of Gain Traction, Don joins Mike Edge to talk about going from covering sports and Hall of Fame athletes to writing about the tire industry. Don takes Mike on his career journey with fascinating stories about constantly trying to get an interview with Fran Tarkenton, being on the field during John Elway’s legendary 98-yard drive against the Browns, and a crazy situation he witnessed on the road with a team.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Don Detore discusses covering LeBron James as a sports reporter in Ohio
How an interview with Fran Tarkenton changed Don’s image of his childhood hero
Why Don and his wife named their first dog Webster
Don shares how he transitioned from the newspaper industry to writing and editing for tire publications
What are Don and his team at Tire Business currently working on?
Don reveals the hit TV show where his mentor’s daughter was a star

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast, where we feature top automotive entrepreneurs and experts and share their inspiring stories. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Mike:

Welcome to the Gain Traction podcast. I am Mike Edge, your host today. The Gain Traction podcast is where I talk with top tire and automotive business leaders. So today, Gain Traction podcasters, I wanted to encourage you, if you haven’t already, to listen to a podcast I did with Lance Bullock, President of OE Wheels. I’d like to give him a shout out because he’s a great guy and he’s created a great company with his uncle. And their story is a great story. So if you get a chance to listen to that podcast. Our sponsor today is our parent company, Tread Partners. Tread Partners is in the business of designing and developing custom websites for tire dealers and auto repair shops with more than five locations. What Tread has learned over the years is that when you have five or more locations, your business is really like five businesses under one name. So the website needs to do a good job of promoting each location’s strengths. To learn more, visit treadpartners.com.

All Right, Gain Traction listeners, I am excited to introduce to you our guest today. He has been serving the tire industry and does not sell tires to customers directly, but he does enthusiastically support our industry in a way that few can. So it could be said that he does sell tires for our industry as a whole through a great publication we all know, Tire Business. Today’s guest is the editor for Tire Business, Don Detour. Don, welcome to the Gain Traction podcast.

Don:

Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate being here.

Mike:

Well, it’s a pleasure having you. I’ve been excited about interviewing you and I think you do a great job with your publication. But, well, you know this thing’s biographical, so we got to know a little bit about you, Don. So we’re going to back up and ask where are you from and how’d you grow up and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Don:

Well, I’ll take you back into my time machine. I grew up in a little city called Ashtabula, Ohio, which is on the northeast tip of Ohio. I grew up about six blocks from Lake Erie and very rarely went in the water, and I regret that to this day. But anyway, I was always real good at words in English in high school, not much with math and numbers. So I decided I wanted to do something with writing. And between my junior and senior year, my aunt pointed out a little classified ad in our local newspaper advertising for a part-time sports writer at our local paper. So I thought, oh, what the heck? I might as well apply and see how it goes. And 46 years later, I am still a journalist. I got hired, and it wasn’t probably two weeks later when I found myself on a donkey in the middle of a high school gymnasium playing donkey basketball and writing about a game that I was covering and playing in.

Mike:

Oh my gosh.

Don:

It was pretty funny. And I like to tell the story that I scored half of my team’s points in a four to two victory that we had over the other team.

Mike:

That’s great.

Don:

That was the highlight of my athletic career. So from that point on, I started working at the Star Beacon and worked there for a while through senior year high school. Rest of the years in college, I would come back and cover high school football games on the weekend. I used to laugh because I think I spent more in gas getting to those games than I did in getting paid to cover those games.

Mike:

That’s great.

Don:

But it was great experience and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I got out of a college, I went to what was then in Walsh College.

Mike:

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Don:

Yeah. I got out of college and then figured, you know what, I had enough of this journalism stuff. I don’t want to write anymore. I want to do something different. So I applied to, I don’t know, 50 different organizations trying to get a communications or marketing job. And it just so happens there was a recession that year, and I think I still have a stack of rejection letters in my basement. So my then fiance and I were talking about our wedding plans, and I thought, I better get my butt a job because I need to afford at least a small apartment. So I went back to my roots and ended up getting a job with the Painesville Telegraph as a sports writer, the now defunct Painesville Telegraph. Got a job as a sports writer there. I worked there for a few years, became sports editor, and then a few years later I got hired by the Canton Ohio Repository as a sports writer.

And I spent 25 years, 24 years of my career covering sports for the Repository, doing everything from high school wrestling and gymnastics to covering a national championship football game with Ohio State. I covered LeBron James both in high school and in the pros.

Mike:

That’s a coincidence.

Don:

Covered the Browns for three years back in the day when the Browns were relevant. And probably many of our listeners don’t remember those days, but-

Mike:

I do. I do. So we’re talking about our age here, but you mentioned a story, because I’m going to look this up on YouTube before our interview, but The Drive that John Elway did, you’re in there right? On the sideline?

Don:

Yeah, yeah. I covered the Browns from ’88, ’89, and ’90. And back in those days, the NFL used to let writers on the field five minutes before the game ended, and at that point, the Browns had the lead, and I’m thinking, I’m going to the Super Bowl. I cannot wait to go. I’m set. And John Elway takes the ball from their own two and drives down the field, and ESPN will always play the highlights of that game or the lowlights if you’re a Browns fan.

Mike:

All perspectives, right? Yeah.

Don:

And I see myself on the field just following the game. I know what I was wearing and hard to pick me out, but man, it’s a brutal memory, but it’s a fun memory too, because it’s a classic game.

Mike:

Oh, there’s no doubt. And I still remember that game so well. I mean, because you’re right. I mean, it is one of the NFL’s, one of those pivotal moments they love to highlight. And yeah, if you’re a Browns fan, it wasn’t, but I get it.

Don:

Yeah. In 1990, I went to London to cover the Browns playing in the American Bowl there.

Mike:

Oh, that’s a great opportunity.

Don:

It was pretty cool. But the funny thing is, an assistant coach at the time with the Browns, he was a fairly highly recognizable coach. On that trip he brought both his wife and his mistress. So he had a really… [inaudible 00:07:39] maneuvering. I don’t know how he accomplished that or whether he got caught, but-

Mike:

It sounds like a lot of work to me. I don’t know.

Don:

Exactly, exactly.

Mike:

Well, so you probably then, I mean, being in Canton in the area, you probably covered a lot of the Hall of Fame stuff too, didn’t you?

Don:

I did, yeah. I covered the Hall of Fame every year when I was there and got to know a lot of the Hall of Famers, and-

Mike:

That would’ve been a blast. I remember as a kid, I was a Steelers fan and Jack Lambert, because I played linebacker, was my kind of guy that I wanted to emulate when I was player or whatever. But you probably met him too, I would guess.

Don:

Yeah, I did. He never really come back very much. Maybe once or twice. I remember… I’m a Minnesota Viking fan as well. I have a lot of Minnesota Viking stuff in my office here, but I was a fan back in the day when they had a quarterback named Fran Tarkenton, and he got in the Hall of Fame, and I campaigned very vociferously to do the story on him when he got inducted. And they let me do it, and the guy would never return my calls. And I got so frustrated with him. And this was a time before voicemail and caller ID, and I called his secretary one day and I said, “Hello?” And she says, “Don,” and she recognized my voice without anything because I had been calling so much. And she says, “Don, does he need to talk to you in order to get in the Hall of Fame?” And I kind of pinched myself, and I said, “Yeah, he does.” Even though he didn’t.

Mike:

I love it. Oh my gosh, that’s awesome.

Don:

And he ended up talking to me for 10 minutes, and it wasn’t a very good interview, but it kind of shattered my childhood fantasy of what a great guy Fran Tarkenton was until I got the opportunity to try to interviewed him. And then I thought he wasn’t very good. But yeah, I had a lot of those experiences, that was so much fun.

Mike:

That is, so let me ask you this. All right, I’m going to go the other way with that. Did you ever have somebody you thought was going to be a jerk and turned out to be a great guy that you enjoyed getting to know?

Don:

Oh yeah. I’ll tell you, the Browns used to have a receiver, second-round draft choice out of San Diego State named Webster Slaughter.

Mike:

Oh yeah.

Don:

And back in the day, he would make the catch and twirl a ball in front of the defensive back being a hot shot.

Mike:

That was unusual back then.

Don:

Exactly, exactly. And you thought he was a jerk or just a prima donna. I’ll tell you what, Mike, you couldn’t meet a nicer man than Webster. Very cordial, win or lose, drop pass or outstanding reception, he would talk to you after the game, take responsibility, whatever. Just thought the world of him so much that three years ago, my wife and I rescued our first dog and his name is Webster.

Mike:

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s fantastic. I like to hear stories like that. I mean, because you do have different images. I don’t know that I would’ve had an extremely positive image of him because I do remember some of that stuff. But yeah, no, that’s an awesome story. Well, so as you were in the sports world for, I mean, for so long and just had such an awesome, just fun career, you navigated somehow to tires and I think when did you finally get to tires? And then we’ll go with that direction for a little bit.

Don:

Sure, sure. I became the executive editor at the newspaper. It was pretty much of a dream job, but the newspaper industry, it was clear that it was going downhill very fast. The online stuff was just emerging, and I had become editor and was disenchanted with the way the newspaper was going. So I just flat out resigned, decided I wanted to take my career in a new direction. And I was fortunate enough to land with Crain Communications-

Mike:

Which is the parent company of Tire Business.

Don:

Tire Business, right. And I worked for a publication called Rubber and Plastics News. Now it’s named Rubber News. But I was hired as basically a copy editor, but I just wanted to work. I wanted to get back into the journalistic industry, really knew nothing about rubber, nothing about tires, but I was game to learn. Worked there for three years, and the editor and publisher of Tire Business, Dave Zielasko, he decided he wanted to just concentrate on the publishing side and decided he wanted to hire an editor. And he told the staff about it and I said, “Hey, I’m interested in that. I’d love to do that.” And he said, “That’s great, but I’m going to do a national job search for this.” And I said, “That’s fine,” but I threw my name in the hat.

A week later he comes back to me and he says, “You know what? I can’t find anybody better than you. I’d like you to be the new editor at Tire Business.” And since that time, I’ve really immersed myself in the industry and absolutely love it. And I’ll tell you what, Mike, if I had done, if I had covered tires my whole career, I would die a happy man just because it’s such a fun, interesting, entertaining industry and something that I’ve really, really enjoyed.

Mike:

And I love hearing you say that because you and I were talking beforehand, and I mean, tires are tires. I mean, in a lot of ways they can be a commodity, but the people in the industry are so salt of the earth, down to earth, great people, great entrepreneurs, and it’s just a lot of fun getting to know the people, I would say.

Don:

It is. It’s a lot of relationships, and I think I made this statement to you before we went live. I’ve met a lot of people in this industry that I have friends for life, even more so than in my newspaper career. A lot of people I really think highly of are very talented. And it’s unfortunate because when you tell an outsider that you work in the tire industry, they look at you like you have three eyes or four ears, and what are you doing? What can be interesting about that? It’s something that’s round and black and rolls.

Mike:

And it’s on every car, who caress, right?

Don:

Yeah, exactly. I used to have a boss at the newspaper who would just be so upset when he’d have to replace his tires because he couldn’t really show them off. It was X amount of money for these four things. But you know as well as I, it’s such an integral part of our life and our lifestyle, and you know you’re in the industry when you pull up alongside of a car and you roll down your window and you check to see what tires are on the car beside you, or you get out of the car in the parking lot and you start checking what the name and brand name of those tires are.

Mike:

Yeah, it’s like you’re rubbernecking, and you’ll sit there and I’ll be walking with my wife or something and we’ll be walking in somewhere and you kind of lean over and she goes, “What did you do? Drop something?” “No, just seeing what this guy’s tires are.

Don:

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

Mike:

It is funny. So you got the Tire Business and I got to compliment you guys. You do a great job. I love the app. I have the app and it’s one of those for me, it’s one of those go-to apps. It’s on my home screen that I literally tap it to see what’s new all the time. And it’s just successful. Don’t get me wrong, I actually love the hard copy. I love getting it in the mail and I love opening it up and marking pages of people that I may want to interact with or whatever. But that app is just, for me, is a fundamental piece of almost my daily activity, I’d say. So tell us a little bit about Tire Business, the direction, where you see it going, and just give us what you guys… I know, I think you mentioned that right now, you’re working on the Global Tire Report?

Don:

Yeah, we just published that on, it actually comes out today, the day we’re taping this. It is our most popular issue of the year. Within that issue, we rank the top 75 tire makers globally in terms of sales, show where they rank in previous years. And then we also list every tire manufacturing plant in the world revealing the capacity, the tires they make, the number of employees, whether they’re union or non-union, what country they’re in. It’s just a phenomenal piece of data and I’m really proud of a staff that’s able to do that. I work with five other people, one of which is a designer mostly, the others work on the editorial or online side, and they just do a phenomenal job of putting together this stuff.

One of the reporters, I think the world of is a gentleman we have named Bruce Davis. He has worked at Crain for 42 years. He was there at the outset of Tire Business, helped design the first issue. And I like to say he’s forgotten more about the tire industry than most people know, and he is the driving force behind our Global Tire Report. He started it, and to this day really works hard on getting that information and we’re really proud of it. And as I told you beforehand, Frank Seiberling, the guy who started Goodyear happened to start Goodyear the same week that our Global Tire Report is being published. So in this particular issue, we had to make sure we represented both topics, and so we have a really cool timeline on Goodyear’s 125th anniversary in this current issue.

Mike:

Oh, that’s awesome.

Don:

We do really good work for them, the staff that we have. And what I like is that we not only provide the news, but we also offer some perspective on it, not opinion so much, but perspective to help a tire dealer or somebody within the tire industry know the industry better.

Mike:

Well, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, and you guys do certain types of recognition things throughout the year where you recognize top dealers or humanitarian, et cetera, and it’s quite frankly, it’s rewarding to open up Tire Business and see what you guys are highlighting and who’s being acknowledged in the industry. I think that’s always fun.

Don:

Yeah, it’s funny, on Friday I got a call from a top executive at a real prominent tire company, and it’s a tire company that really works very hard, very diligently to stay underneath the radar. And he called me, he was involved, his company was involved in a story we had done, and he called me to talk about it off the record. And he told me he had so much respect for me and our publication that he wanted to offer some perspective to it, even though it was off the record. And I thought that really spoke to what our publication provides to the industry.

Mike:

That’s awesome. Yeah, no, and it says a lot about the culture that you guys have created. I mean, that he felt that comfortable to call you to do that. And I think, I mean, I almost look at you guys as a beacon in the industry and in the sense that we all go to our sources, but you guys highlight so many important things and so many important people, and you do it in such a classy way that I tip my hat to you. I mean, you’re almost like a central station too for information and networking, if that makes sense.

Don:

Yeah. We like to offer all kinds of news for our audience, good, bad or indifferent. If the market take its turn for bad, we’re going to report it. If there’s a death at a factory, we don’t like it anymore than the company does, but it’s news that people need to know about, so we report that. And if the industry’s going gangbusters as it’s done in the last few years, we’re going to report that too. So yeah, it’s a lot of fun. A lot of… In fact, just before we got on the phone today, I got a tip about a change in a direction of a company and I wrote a little story about it, and there’s more to come about this particular company, but it’s one of those things where we are out there to report that information, to inform the industry and make the industry more successful.

Mike:

And that’s what I meant by my introduction with you particularly. I mean, you guys, you really do help the industry. And negative news is not always the worst thing. I mean, I think it’s important to report whatever the facts are. And led me to a thought I just had. How did you guys as a publication feel like you navigated the pandemic? Because obviously that was a very big unknown for so many people in the industry.

Don:

Yeah, there’s a couple of ways to look at that. I think one of the internal ways was how do you put out a publication when you’re not meeting in person? And that was a difficult thing, but we quickly soon realized that we can do this and we can do this as well, if not better than when we were doing it before. So once we got over that hurdle, the other hurdle is not being in touch with a lot of the folks, the face-to-face contact, but that stopped everywhere in all industries. So it wasn’t like you were missing anything, but you just had to stay plugged in with the folks that you knew and keep contact with them via email and phone- [inaudible 00:23:05]

Mike:

Almost like you knew you weren’t going to travel. You had to make the intention to reach out to them. Yeah.

Don:

Yeah, you had to figure out a way to stay in contact with them that you didn’t have to figure out before. And that maybe I don’t have to do right now because traveling is still is back full bore. But I think that’s one of the reasons why when Goodyear purchased Cooper, it took the industry by surprise because it happened at a time when people weren’t meeting a lot. There were no events, so there wasn’t that rumor mill going on in the background and all this stuff.

Mike:

That’s a great example. That’s a great point because there wasn’t the conferences and conventions, and therefore the rumor mill wasn’t able to churn. And therefore when it did come out, it did surprise everybody.

Don:

Yeah. Yeah. It surprised the heck out of me. I mean, I think the industry knew Cooper was right for someone to come in and buy it. Apollo had tried to do that six or seven years earlier. Nearly did. But the fact that Goodyear, one American company buys another American company and it flew under the radar as much as it did, it’s pretty remarkable. And I don’t think that would’ve happened had there not been a pandemic.

Mike:

And I think that’s a great example. I really mean that. Another quick question for you. What about conventions and conferences? Do you attend very many of those? Do you plan on attending anything coming up?

Don:

It’s a good thing my wife is in here because she’d be screaming in the background because my travel schedule has been extremely heavy. She actually had rotator cuff surgery at the end of May and the good husband that I am, I traveled three straight Tuesdays after that, a trip to Nebraska, a trip to Las Vegas, and a trip to Panama. So to answer your question, I’ve been traveling a lot, going to a lot of different events. I have three or four events coming up at the end of the year already and got invited to one or two other ones that I’m trying to sort out. So it’s not only back to where it was before, I think. I think it’s ramped up even some because of the pent up desire that was quelled for those few years that nobody went anywhere.

Mike:

No, I agree with you. It feels like that as well. Well, we’re coming up on our hard stop, but I always like to ask people, and typically I ask people a question about making us laugh, but because of your career in sports, I thought, tell us an interesting story if you’ve got one that comes to mind based on your path in your career, and it’s somebody that, somebody’s mentored you or something like that along the way.

Don:

Yeah, there’s a lot of stories I could tell, but I think one of the most interesting and most rewarding ones. I was a rookie beat reporter for the Canton Ohio newspaper, and I was assigned to cover the Browns and got on the beat and happened to meet the then beat writer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer at the time, and his name was Chuck Eaton. And Chuck was probably in his early 70s and still working hard and covering the beat well. And Chuck just knew everybody and everything, particularly about the Browns. He was there when the Browns were formed. And he came up to me one of my first days on the job and he said, “Don, if there’s anything I can do to help you, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.” And I thought-

Mike:

You guys are competitors, right?

Don:

We were a competitor. We were a competitor. I think that they kind of looked at us as kind of a country bumpkin back then, but we were, in my mind, we were as good or better than they were in a lot of respects, but that’s just the competitive journalists coming out in me. But yeah, we were competitors, and here’s a guy offering his counsel to me, and I recall him being on the phone and talking to a group of reporters about his daughter, Patty, and he would say, “Oh, Patty’s very talented. She’s such a nice girl. She’s really trying to make a name for herself.” And she was out on the West Coast trying to make a name for herself in the entertainment industry, and I wished him well with that. His other son, Michael, was a well-known entertainment reporter with the Plain Dealer. Well, flash forward a few years later, his daughter, Patty Heaton, gets a lead role in a series called Everybody Loves Raymond, and she played the role of Ray Romano’s wife on Everybody Loves Raymond and had that role for nine years.

And then I think after that she went to a series called The Middle, and on the series called The Middle, I had a cousin work on that series as a stand-in, so he worked on the set every day with all the actors and actresses, and he got to know Patricia Heaton. And one day I was fortunate enough to go visit him. He invited me to watch an episode being taped, and during a break in the taping, he introduced me to Patricia Heaton and told her that I had used to work with her dad. And she was just thrown back, and I told her the story that I had said that her dad was just such a big help to me being a rookie reporter and what he did, and she had tears streaming down her eyes telling me that she had never heard a story like that before. And she thanked me for it and took a picture with me, and it was one of the highlights of my career to tell somebody like that about their dad.

Mike:

Yeah. No, it’s a beautiful story. Well, on another note, I always ask folks too, to tell us something about themselves, and I’m going to pull one out for you. Tell us one of your favorite places to visit or where you like to go.

Don:

Yeah, I think my happy place is a camp near North Bay, Ontario, Canada called Sun Bay Cottages, and we have been going there for 30 years now. My aunt and uncle took me there when I was like seven or eight, and I went with them for a few years, and I was lucky enough that when I got married and had kids, took my wife and kids there and took my aunt and uncle back there. They were elderly at the time, and we’ve been going there for 30 years. And I tell people, it’s not the Hilton, but it’s comfortable. It’s fun.

I’d love to go out and fish on the lake, go out for pickerel fishing, which is walleye. And I’m going in another week to go pike fishing out there. So it always brings a smile to my face. I’ve gotten to know the Canadian people that come up during the week we’re there so well that they’re like family to us. We go to their house, they come to ours. And as I told you earlier, my daughter got married 11 years ago, and 15 members of our quote, unquote, “Canadian family” came down for the wedding, and they still talk about it.

Mike:

That’s beautiful. No, that really, that’s fantastic. It’s a testament to your friendships. Look, there’s something about being isolated and fishing and the bond you have with people out there. Yeah. And one of these days I want to talk to you about the difference between walleye and pike fishing and what you do, but I did pike fishing when I was a kid long time ago, but being a Southern boy, we fish for bass, so.

Don:

Yeah. Yeah. I’ll get the occasional bass, but that’s by accident, not by design. We’re pretty well gone for pike when we get the bass.

Mike:

Yeah. Well, Don, I really, I can’t thank you enough for being part of Gain Traction podcast. It’s been a real pleasure.

Don:

Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. You guys do a great job and keep up the good work.

Mike:

Well, and we’d like to have you back sometime, but to all our Gain Traction podcast listeners, thank you very much for being part of the podcast. If you’d like to recommend a guest to us, please email me at [email protected]. We take all recommendations seriously. Until next time, have a great day and be safe.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the Gain Traction podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.

Contents hide

1 In this episode…

1.1 Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

1.2 Resources mentioned in this episode: