By Mike Marsee

Contributing Writer

No one loved a good game more than Marty Warren.

Whether it was a state championship, a local Little League game or anything in between, Marty enjoyed being close to the action.

That’s what led him to quickly say yes when he was asked in 1975 to cover local sports for The Advocate-Messenger, and why he continued to do so for most of half a century.

It’s also what led him into other sports-related pursuits, from working as a baseball umpire to serving the recreation department to covering sports for local radio stations.

In all of those avenues, he became a valuable resource to entities that came to depend on his work and a champion for generations of young athletes, many of whom might not even have known his name.

It’s important for me to say that I lost a friend – probably the best friend I’ve made in my 33 years in this community – when we lost Marty to cancer last week.

It’s more important, however, to say that all of us lost a man who was quite simply one of the best friends the local sports community has ever had.

Marty, who died Wednesday at age 66, covered sports for the Advocate from 1975-2018 and 2020-21. He became a fixture on the sideline at local games and was beloved by the coaches he covered.

“Marty could bring a Friday night HS (football) game in central KY come back to life w/ his stories on Saturday night & Sunday morning. We have lost a wonderful man and friend, but his impact will live on in the lives he touched,” former Mercer County coach David Buchanan posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Marty didn’t always get to cover the game of the week, but no game was beneath him. Every game and every story mattered to him, and he gave them all his best effort. Coaches knew they would get a fair shake, and readers knew they would get an honest accounting of how the game was won and lost.

The statistics would be solid, too. He was better at recording and compiling statistics on the fly – and on paper, not on some app or program – than any sportswriter I’ve ever seen.

Marty was never a full-time journalist – he did work in the Advocate’s circulation department for a time – but his reporting, reliability and professionalism were such that that made no difference to the readers, the subjects he covered or the editors to whom he answered.

The first of those editors was Bill Vaught, the Advocate’s first sports editor, who asked Warren, just out of high school, to be part of the newspaper’s sports coverage.

“It didn’t take me long to say yes,” Marty wrote in a 2018 farewell column. “After all, I had been involved in sports throughout high school and had already written sports stories for the Advocate during my high school days.”

“Bill Vaught took a chance on a kid right out of high school and I had the best tutor, Larry Vaught, who made me the writer I am today,” he wrote on Facebook in 2016.

Marty was still in high school when he got his first byline on Nov. 12, 1973, atop a story about the Toy Bowl all-star youth football games. His first byline as an Advocate staffer came less than two years later, when he reported on the Boyle County football team’s 54-0 win over Russell County.

He tried to step away from sports in 2011 but was asked to stay on and did so. He did step away after the 2017-18 basketball season, but returned to report on Danville football in the 2020 and ’21 seasons.

Marty also served as a color analyst and statistician for the Hometown Radio Network, working alongside Steve Bertram, Charlie Perry, Joe Mathis and Tim Hollon. He spent six of the past seven football seasons with Mathis at Danville football games, including this season, when he was in the press box for the first five games of the season before stepping away for health reasons.

“I was privileged to be able to work alongside him for 6 yrs. He was the absolute best statistician I’ve seen. I’ll always cherish Fri nights in the booth w/ Marty,” Mathis wrote on X.

Marty saw many of the athletes he covered long before they got to the high school field or court. He spent many years working in a number of capacities with the Danville-Boyle County Parks and Recreation Department. He saw a good many athletes advance from the little leagues all the way to the collegiate and professional levels, and he saw many more grow up to succeed outside the athletic arena.

He was a fixture at Henry Jackson and Millennium parks, Pete Cress/Troy Trumbo Field and gymnasiums all across Danville, doing whatever was needed to keep things running smoothly.

He’ll live on in the scrapbooks and shoeboxes where old newspaper clippings reside and in the memories of those of us who knew and loved him, but he will be missed by so many of us for so many reasons.

I’ll miss the conversations we had about sports and so much more on the way to out-of-town games. I’ll miss sitting alongside him at the Sweet 16, sharing the experience of the tournament that had been part of each of our lives since high school. I’ll miss the stories he shared about the games and people from before my time in Danville that helped me better understand and appreciate this community. And I’ll miss my friend in a hundred other ways as well.

This is a loss for all of us, however. If youth sports make a community better – and I certainly believe they do – then Marty surely had a hand in making this a better place to live through his love for sports, the friendships he made and his impact on so many lives.