Indy Origins: John Zant Goes from Daily to Weekly Sportswriter

My life as a daily newspaper writer ended after 38 years on February 6, 2007, when I was fired by Wendy McCaw, the billionaire owner of the besieged Santa Barbara News-Press.

A month later, I happily began my new life as a weekly sports columnist for the Santa Barbara Independent.

It was an honor to join the company of Nick Welsh, the Independent’s peerless oracle, who memorialized my termination in his Angry Poodle column: “To many of these readers, firing Zant was akin to taking Bambi out behind a barn and slitting his throat with a rusty butter knife.”

I was thereafter known as Bambi to some of my friends.

I was fired along with five other newsroom employees of the News-Press after we stood on a Highway 101 overcrossing with signs protesting McCaw’s flaunting of journalistic ethics and her defiance of labor laws.

We thought we were on solid ground, but our high-mindedness did not ultimately prevail in a conservative D.C. district court. (McCaw later lost other cases as she continued to snub her employees and infamously smear her former editor; and in 2023, the News-Press ceased publication under her bankrupt ownership.)

I was busy writing about basketball at the time of my firing. For 10 years, I had covered every UCSB women’s game, home and away, a beat that made me very popular in the community. I loved the community back – having lived in Santa Barbara since graduating from UCSB in 1968 – and wanted to continue working here. I also was partial to the print medium, having spent my life in newspapers since I bicycled around La Cañada delivering the L.A. Herald Express.

The Independent was an ideal landing spot. It was known for its coverage of arts, culture, and politics – I picked up a copy every Thursday – but it had no regular sports section at the time I was set adrift. Editor-in-chief Marianne Partridge welcomed me aboard, and I made my debut in the March 8, 2007 issue with the cover story: “How UCSB’s Basketball Teams Figure into the Mania of March Madness.”

For the next 13 years, my columns never missed a week in the Independent except for the yearly photo issue. There were plenty of great stories to tell, from the kickoff of high school football, to basketball all over town, to an NAIA women’s title at Westmont, to the Gauchos going deep in NCAA soccer and baseball. 

There were the boys of summer, the Foresters, posting wins and championships at a rate that makes the Dodgers look like slackers; history-makers like John Uelses, who broke the 16-foot pole-vault barrier in Santa Barbara, and Sam Cunningham, who helped break the racial barrier in Deep South college football; adventures in running, hiking and cycling; cover stories on Lakers yeoman Bill Bertka, hoops star Amber Melgoza and legendary jazz musician Charles Lloyd; and every four years, the Olympic Games featuring Santa Barbara athletes in volleyball, water polo, swimming and track and field; and a Paralympic snowboarder in the Winter Games.

Paul Wellman brightened many of my pieces with his photography; and my editors, Michelle Drown, Matt Kettmann, Leslie Dinaberg, Tyler Hayden, and Jackson Friedman – and Tessa Reeg on the copy desk – put up with late-arriving copy.

My streak of weekly columns ended in March 2020, when I composed another March Madness preview as the UCSB and Westmont basketball teams were about to head into the postseason. Shortly after it came off the press, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought sports to a standstill.

It was an opportune time for me to pass the sports editor’s torch to Victor Bryant, who had begun writing stories for the Independent, including a heartfelt remembrance of Kobe Bryant after the Laker star’s tragic death in January 2020.

I still had some contributions to make. I offered personal reflections after the 2024 deaths of O.J. Simpson and Jerry West. How did the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table get started? I recalled covering the first Monday luncheon in 1970. 

Sometimes I looked back to big stories I covered in the News-Press, like the Gaucho women’s basketball team that won 30 games in 2000 but suffered a devastating loss in the NCAA tournament. On the 25^th anniversary, I spoke with Cori Close, who was the associate head coach of that team. Close said, “UCSB taught me how to dream, how to build things,” and a year later, last March, she had built a juggernaut at UCLA that won the NCAA women’s championship.

In more than 50 years of covering sports, I’ve become convinced that losing is a vital part of the enterprise. In December of 2020 I wrote in the Independent: “People learn and grow through failures and setbacks, and sports provide plenty of those experiences. You’re going to get knocked down in football, miss shots in basketball, strike out in baseball, come up short in a race. All those things stoke a desire for improvement, and the bitter pill of defeat can be an effective medicine for achieving maturity.”

That observation was prompted because Donald Trump continued to insist that he had won the 2020 presidential election long after the results were confirmed. I wondered if he’d ever faced a comeuppance in sports; certainly, he only talked about winning in golf, the one sport he played. 

Had he ever acknowledged defeat, a realization that could have forged him into a trustworthy, truthful and gracious character? That column might have gotten me fired by Wendy McCaw.

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As the Santa Barbara Independent celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2026, our staff is sharing their “Indy Origin” stories and other memories. See more of them at independent.com/40. 

You’re all invited to the Indy40Fest on Sat., Aug. 29, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., at  El Presidio de Santa Barbara State Historic Park, where there will be music, panels, booths, and fun for all ages, all for free!