Bill Leffler once mused that maybe he’d keep his sportswriting gig until the calendar reached 2031.
“And maybe I could become the country’s first 100-year-old sportswriter,” Leffler wrote in a column published upon retirement — his second stab at it — in 2020.
Leffler, a sportswriter, columnist and correspondent at The Virginian-Pilot for more than 60 years and a member of the Virginia Sports and Virginia High School League halls of fame, died Sunday. He was 90.
Leffler was a native of Alabama, but since the 1950s he championed sports and athletes in South Hampton Roads — and especially his beloved Portsmouth — after beginning his career at The Portsmouth Star. He began working at The Virginian-Pilot in 1957.