Mike Monroe named winner of the Phil Jasner Lifetime Achievement Award

Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News

Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News has been named the second winner of the Phil Jasner Lifetime Achievement Award by the Professional Basketball Writers Association.

“Mike Monroe provides each of us with the perfect example of how to do our jobs every day — with equal amounts of dedication and determination and a keen eye for detail,” PBWA president Mary Schmitt Boyer of the Cleveland Plain Dealer said. “I am honored to present this award that recognizes his 30 years of passion and professionalism.”

Monroe, a former PBWA president and vice president, covered his first professional basketball game in 1968 and has been writing about the NBA on a full-time basis since 1985, when The Denver Post made him its Nuggets beat reporter. After three years of writing about the NBA for FoxSports.com, he was hired by the San Antonio Express-News in 2004 to be its NBA reporter. He considers it a privilege to have covered some of basketball’s greatest players and to have counted some of the sport’s greatest writers, including Jasner, among his good friends.

The award is named in honor of Jasner, the longtime Philadelphia 76ers beat writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, who died in 2010. Jasner won the PBWA’s lifetime achievement award in 2001.

Sam Smith, a former PBWA president whose career as an NBA columnist and author has spanned more than quarter of a century, won the inaugural Phil Jasner Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011.

Monroe was selected by a committee including Boyer, PBWA vice president Josh Robbins and treasurer Rich Dubroff, Smith and former PBWA presidents Steve Aschburner and Doug Smith, who decided to name the organization’s lifetime achievement award in honor of Jasner after his death.

Monroe will be honored during a San Antonio Spurs playoff game.