By Ernie Clark
The Bangor Daily News
DIXFIELD, Maine — Game time approaches on a sunny Thursday afternoon for Bob McPhee, who received the Medal of Courage from the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2011. Today, it’s a soccer match between Dirigo High School and visiting Mount Abram of Salem on his schedule.

Outside McPhee’s home, his good friend Ryan Palmer arrives to help the wheelchair-bound sportswriter into a van for the short drive to Dirigo, where McPhee is set to cover the game for the Sun Journal of Lewiston and the Rumford Falls Times.

For the 57-year-old McPhee, this routine of covering high school sports — his job since the late 1980s — has been both his livelihood and connection to his past, when he was as a three-sport athlete at Rumford High School during the mid-1970s until a sudden, tragic football injury left him paralyzed.

The damage to his brain stem left him unable to speak and confined to a wheelchair with no use of his extremities — save for a right hand capable of typing messages into a keyboard that speaks for him.

Four decades later, though, McPhee’s enthusiasm about sports remains strong as ever. And his efforts, especially his presence on the sidelines, exhibit a determination few are challenged to find within themselves.

McPhee’s writing career began at the University of Maine where he worked for the Maine Campus and served as the student newspaper’s sports editor.

This history is why on Friday night in Orono, the “M” Club is honoring McPhee’s personal and professional determination as one of six new members to be inducted into the University of Maine Sports Hall of Fame.

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