Tom Fitzgerald (journalist)

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Thomas Joseph Fitzgerald (April 6, 1912 – October 11, 1983) was an American sports journalist for The Boston Globe. For more than 30 years he covered the Boston Bruins and also wrote about golf for the Masters Tournament and the U.S. Open. He was the first president of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association and the first sportswriter to win the Lester Patrick Trophy for service to ice hockey in the United States (1978). He served on the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee for ten years and was its first journalist chairman. The Hockey Hall of Fame later honored him with the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award (1984, posthumously).

Fitzgerald was born in Boston to Irish-American parents and grew up in Dorchester. He played hockey in Franklin Park and graduated from Boston Latin School in 1929. He started at The Boston Globe as a copy boy, later becoming the paper's golf columnist in 1937 and taking on the Bruins beat in 1940. He served in World War II as an Army information specialist after landing at Omaha Beach, earning four battle stars. After the war he returned to writing about hockey and golf, and became a leading figure in local sports journalism. He retired from The Boston Globe in 1977 and died of cancer in Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1983. He is buried in Scituate. He was married to Shirley Yuhas and had one daughter and one son.