The sudden death has taken place in Houston of Joe Conway from Portlaoise, a well known athlete who competed with Ballyfin AC in the 1980s. His death was a major shock as he had just returned to the USA after a short trip home last week.
Joe was the son of Frank and Patricia Conway who live on Colliers Lane. He was the second oldest of a very talented and sporting family of brothers Paul, Noel, Gerard and Brian and had been living in America since 1987.
After leaving Portlaoise, he studied at McNeese State University in Louisiana where he was on an athletics scholarship. For many years he worked at The Houston Cronicle newspaper where he was Director of media relations. Latterly, Joe was Director of Web and media relations at Houston Community College, one of the largest campuses in the US with 70,000 students.
He was a regular visitor back to Ireland where he kept in constant contact with family and old friends, especially those who had a common interest in sport. Indeed it was only at the weekend Joe had a night out with his close friends Jimmy Finn, Ian McCormack and Darren Conroy.
He was a gifted writer who covered many global sporting fixtures and events, and was a regular contributor to the Irish Runner magazine. He was still competing at the highest standard in athletics as a master and finished runner-up at the US masters championships at 800 meters this summer.
In an interview with the Irish Times in 2015 he explained how he ended up living and working in the USA. “I now work two blocks away from the Greyhound station that I ended up at when I first arrived here, which shows you just how much progress I’ve made over the years,” said.
“I was living in Dublin after leaving school and working in the civil service and spending all my free time running when the opportunity came up to take up the scholarship in Louisiana. It was perfect for me because I was on a career break and didn’t want to go back to my job.
“I also wasn’t in a position to go to college because unfortunately my parents found themselves in a situation in which they were making decent money but not enough to put their children through university so I figured this was my one and only chance to do it,” he said.
“I’d be doing something like covering baseball and you’d get all these people wondering why there was some Irish guy reporting on it and whether I understood the rules or not but that wasn’t an issue for me.
“During my career in journalism, I ended up covering lots of cool stuff and working on some groundbreaking moves into online, including building a website for one newspaper,” he said.
Over the years Conway held various editing and management positions at the Lake Charles American Press and then the Houston Chronicle. While with the Chronicle he worked as online sports editor for the newspapers website, where he won a number of awards for his work, including national recognition from the Online News Association for its online coverage of Super Bowl XXXVIII, which was held in Houston.
“I was heavily involved in looking after online and spent 10 years with the Chronicle where my role was to sort out change management. That involved getting the sports writers to produce content for the website as well as the newspaper. While there, I also led projects such as building a website for the Superbowl,” he said.
“Funnily enough, given the career I’m in now, another of the projects I worked on while at the Chronicle was developing a high school database for the Houston area, which was a pretty big undertaking given that we have some 200 schools here,” Conway added.
Joe is survived by his wife Kelly and two sons Cassidy and Colin.
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