Maury Povich, Connie Chung Give $1.5M to Expand Sports Journalism Center Endowment

Iconic talk show host Maury Povich, trailblazing broadcaster Connie Chung ’69 and their family have pledged $1.5 million to expand The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism endowment, helping to secure the future of the University of Maryland center named for his father.

The funds will support the continued operations of the Povich Center, which prepares students in UMD’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism to become leaders and innovators in sports media. It was launched in 2011 with a $1 million gift from siblings Maury, David and Lynn Povich to honor the work of their father, a legendary sports columnist and journalist with The Washington Post for 75 years until his death at age 92. 

Maury Povich announced the gift Nov. 5 at the annual Povich Symposium, which celebrated the center’s 15th anniversary. He challenged the audience to help sustain the Povich Center’s contributions to the field “for generations to come” by matching the couple’s support with gifts of their own.

“We've been proud to see [the center] grow from a few courses to an incredible sports journalism-focused student experience, which now carries these students around the world,” said Povich, whose 31-year run hosting an eponymous show ended in 2022. 

At the event, he recorded an episode of his podcast, “On Par with Maury Povich,” with Pulitzer Prize-winning sports journalist Pablo Torre. Chung was the first Asian American and second woman to anchor a national evening newscast. She and Povich have been married since 1984.

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“Maury, Connie and the Povich family have had a transformative impact with their investments in Merrill College. The Povich Center put sports journalism front and center at Maryland — and that is now a vital part of who we are and why students come to study at Merrill,” said Rafael Lorente, dean of Merrill College. “Thank you to the Povich family and everyone who joins us in sustaining the center by matching this incredible gift.” 

The gift supports Forward: The University of Maryland Campaign for the Fearless, the largest fundraising initiative in the university’s history with a goal to raise $2.5 billion to expand access to UMD’s first-rate education, spur transformative research and create stronger communities. This is the largest gift Merrill College has received during the public phase of the campaign.

“The Povich family has made possible a center that is unique to sports journalism,” said Mark Hyman, the inaugural George Solomon Endowed Chair in Sports Journalism and the Povich Center’s director. “It's really one of the jewels of Merrill College and the preeminent sports journalism center in the country. And I couldn't be more proud of that and more grateful to them.”

Founded under the leadership of former Washington Post sports editor George Solomon, the center has long offered sports journalism courses, a summer camp for high school students, the symposium and other public programs — and even sends one student a year to cover the Super Bowl. 

The center grew under Hyman’s leadership to include classes that teach sports broadcast, producing and data analysis, student-driven enterprise and investigative projects, and study abroad opportunities. “We're training students to think expansively about what it means to be a sports journalist. That's very much the legacy of Shirley Povich,” Hyman said. 

He described Shirley Povich as “way ahead of his time,” writing as far back as the 1930s criticizing Major League Baseball’s commissioner and team owners for the league’s segregationist policies. Maury Povich said at the symposium his father “always believed that sports opened the door into race, into money, into power, into ethics.”

The Povich Center enables students to practice the kind of journalism for which Shirley Povich was known, particularly with its investigative journalism capstone course that has covered topics including Title IX and high school sports.

“That’s our goal for the Povich Center — for us to continue to do the kind of good work that we do, and for students to have the experience of producing that work,” Hyman said. “They're getting invaluable training, not only in the writing and the reporting but in the critical thinking that's required to take on these stories.”