Reusse: A journey to southeast Minnesota with the great John Millea

SPRING VALLEY, MINN. – The thunderstorms that produced torrential rain and crackling lightning for much of Minnesota starting late Thursday afternoon had done their duty. They left behind a spectacular blue-sky and low-humidity holiday weekend.

The high schools that had stuck with tradition and scheduled their football openers on the Friday before Labor Day were rewarded with a can’t-be-topped Minnesota evening, including here in the deep southeast of the state.

Kingsland High, a merger of Spring Valley (pop. 2,452) and Wykoff (433) that took place three decades ago, would be entertaining LeRoy-Ostrander in a duel of expected Nine-Player powerhouses.

And, yes, slap me upside the head … I kept calling it Nine-Man in conversations all night.

John Millea provided the transportation for the 100-minute trip to Spring Valley. Millea was an excellent teammate for two decades (1991-2010) on the Star Tribune sports staff. He was on the copy desk for five years, in the day of print only and when crafting a headline that fit the “count” was an art.

Millea was numero uno in that area, and I’m not blowing smoke. This was discussed on our drive and John said: “I’d been on the desk for years in Des Moines and Phoenix before the Star Tribune and always enjoyed writing heads. I took it as an entertaining challenge.’’

Example: Ron Maly was a long-serving sportswriter in Des Moines. He was writing a piece years later looking back at the 1980 Iowa Hawkeyes that went to the Final Four — a Lute Olson team known for its lack of depth.

Maly loved the next day’s headline, “Fabulous Few to Final Four,” and researched the source. And his follow-up piece offered this shocking news to Des Moines readers: The ageless head had been written by Millea, then a Drake student working part-time on the desk.

“I think that Maury White had come up with the ‘Fabulous Few’ name earlier that season,’’ Millea said. “I just went with that on deadline.’’

Millea’s duties at the Strib changed in the mid-’90s: backing up on Wolves and Twins, later the Wild, covering the other team’s locker room for the Vikings. He was in Atlanta for a week doing Falcons stories before they came to the Metrodome for the NFC title game in January 1999.

“I was walking in from the parking lot in Atlanta, Dan Reeves, the Falcons coach, saw me as an unfamiliar face, walked over and introduced himself, and we talked for a while,’’ Millea said. “That’s not happening with NFL coaches today, I’d guess.’’

Millea was reassigned to covering high schools in 2006. “I was a little rattled by that for couple of days, and then discovered that I loved it,” he said.

As part of his duties, Millea would cover meetings of the Minnesota State High School League board. Dave Stead was the executive director — a time when the board would make a decision, with a policy not to publicly comment on those no matter how controversial.

Millea questioned the wisdom of this as a reporter, and so did Stead, eventually. He came to believe the MSHSL should start telling some of its stories and explain decisions on its website.

A job opening was posted. Millea was among a handful of applicants and was an easy choice for Stead. John left the Strib (buyouts were being offered to staff veterans, as financial luck would have it, in 2010) and became what was believed a first for state high school leagues in the U.S.:

Full-time contributions from a roving reporter — “John’s Journal” appearing on what had been a bureaucratic and statistical website.

A sponsor was found for Millea’s journeys. He’s now in his fourth Toyota, adorned with a caricature of him created by former MSHSL graphic designer Tracie Bressler.

In a previous vehicle, Millea convinced his wife Beth — a high school girlfriend from the booming burg of Graettinger, Iowa (current pop. 811) — to make a trip with him to Roseau, where he would report a piece on the Borowicz basketball stars, Kacie and Katie.

“The weather kept getting worse,” Millea said. “We finally were on an ice-covered road, going 30 miles an hour tops, me with both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead.”

He was afraid to even glance sideways at Beth, either out of fear of sliding into the ditch, or the stare he would be receiving for talking her into making this slow, treacherous trip.

“We lived,” he said.

Forty-two years married now, three kids, two grandkids, and he will be retiring from John’s Journal and the MSHSL next June — the end of his 15th school year of traveling to nooks, crannies and cities of Minnesota.

Millea has seen a thousand games and he took me to great one on this wonderful first Friday of football: LeRoy-Ostrander (with several reinforcements now from Austin Pacelli and Lyle) 35, Kingsland (last year’s state runners-up) 26.

We spent almost three hours as LeRoy-Ostrander’s tremendous senior, Camden Hungerholt, managed to outduel Kingsland’s terrific junior, Kaleem Reiland.

“I thought it would be even higher scoring,” Kingsland coach Matt Kolling told Millea on the field postgame. “I thought the winner would be in the 50s.”

Millea’s summation of the splendid evening came earlier, when he took it all in and said:

“I have one brother who was a surgeon, and another who is a lawyer, but I think I’m the luckiest Millea. Look what I get to do for a living.”