PORTLAND (AP) – Dick Doyle, who covered high school sports for the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram for 44 years, died Friday night. He was 86.

Doyle retired as a full time sportswriter in 1984 but continued on a part time basis until the early 1990s. The Bowdoin College graduate and World War II veteran was inducted into the Maine Press Association Hall of Fame in 2004.

Doyle’s stories emphasized the positive aspects of the players and teams he covered.

“If Dick couldn’t say something nice about you or your team, he wouldn’t say anything,” said William Curran, Deering High softball coach and a longtime friend of Doyle. “He was the best thing to happen to high school sports.”

Doyle also involved himself in the teams and communities he covered. He was often invited to many of the annual sports banquets, and could be counted on to give a speech or sing a song he wrote for the occasion.

“I think he knew one song – Hello Dolly – but he’d write his own words for whatever town he was in,” said Jack Flynn, who coached football in South Portland for 25 years.

His speeches, like his columns, were often longer than they had to be, largely because he hated to leave anyone out. Coaches who knew him said he wanted to give as much recognition to as many athletes as possible.

Doyle’s son, Peter, said his father was a man of words. “He used the English language in ways that often boggled a young child’s mind. He always could have used a simpler word but didn’t, because that was his way.”

He had a prodigious memory, with friends often marveling at how he could recall the players, statistics and scores of games he had seen 20 years earlier.

“I threw shot put at Cheverus High School and I was not great,” Curran recalled. “When I ran into Dick 10 or 15 years later, he said, You were fifth place in the shot put in 1958.’ And he was right. Now who would care about that? My mother and father didn’t even remember that.”

Doyle is survived by his wife, Anne; sons Peter, of Westbrook, and Timothy, of San Francisco; and daughters Nancy, of Cape Elizabeth, and Joanne Doyle-Switz, of Charlottesville, Va.

A funeral Mass will be celebrated Wednesday at St. Patrick’s Church in Portland.

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Information from: Portland Press Herald, https://www.pressherald.com

AP-ES-06-04-05 1553EDT