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These four men helped the Roanoke Valley briefly become “Sportstown, Virginia” in 1995 (and one with a puck instead of a ball).
it’s been 22 years now, and the boys of summer (winter, spring and fall) are still playing at sports. There they were on the cover of the July, 1995, issue of The Roanoker, owning and managing professional sports teams in the valley and begging the Roanoker’s question, “Sportstown, Va.?”
Their professional sports team affiliations are a distant memory. Their involvement in sports, however, is not. Consider:
Sam Lazzaro, 63, who was general manager of the then-Salem Avalanche baseball team, is a sports lawyer.
Pierre Paiement, 66, who co-owned the Roanoke Express pro hockey team, is a personal trainer.
Doug Fonder, 69, who co-owned the pro soccer Riverdawgs, is head coach/CEO of the Gators swim club.
Nick Rush, 49, who owned the Roanoke Rush (get it?) minor league football team, is a player in the toughest contact sport of all: politics. He is a member of the General Assembly of Virginia.
More details on where they are these days:
Lazzaro was with the Redbirds, Buccaneers and Avalanche for 11 years in Salem. He earned his attorney spurs “reading law” (as opposed to going to law school) at the office of Richard Padgett in three years. Passing the bar, he says, is like “getting a driver’s license. You get the license, then you learn to drive.”
He’s “learned to drive” by litigating 2,000 cases in his 11 years and finally focusing his practice on sports. Reading law was a secret until he had passed the bar because “I didn’t want to fall on my face.”
Lazzaro worked in ad sales for the Blue Ridge Business Journal, as well as the Sports Journal and Play By Play magazines. He wrote the book “More Than a Ball Game: An Inside Look at Minor League Baseball” shortly after he reluctantly left the Avalanche.
He still lives in the western end of Roanoke County and remains married to Sue. His son Sammy is food supervisor at Carilion and Justin owns an internet startup.
Nick Rush represents Montgomery County and environs in the Virginia House of Representatives. He is a former Montgomery County Board of Supervisors member and has worked as a FedEx driver, Farm Bureau agent and financial services professional.
Rush was a 140-pound high school football player and kept his interest in football, founding the Rush. The team lasted three years and “we were pretty good,” he says. The high cost of running a football team finally got the best of the Rush, which averaged 5,000 in attendance its first year and 3,000 its last.
Rush has been married 14 years (second marriage), lives in Christiansburg and he has two sons who are officers in military service, and a young daughter.
Doug Fonder has been in charge of the Roanoke Gators since 1988. He started the Riverdawgs soccer team because “my son, Justin, was playing at the time” and it seemed like a good idea. The Riverdawgs, which later became the Raft, lasted about eight years.
In addition to the Gators, Fonder is with the Virginia Baptist Children’s Home and is president/CEO of the International Swim Coach Association. He has been married, the second time, for 20 years and has six children—two of them step, one adopted.
Pierre Paiement came to Roanoke to play professional hockey for the Rebels (actually rising to the Philadelphia Blazers of World Hockey Association for eight games in 1973) and would end up co-owning a franchise in the East Coast Hockey League 1993-’97.
After hockey, he turned to helping sell mascots to colleges, owning a Quiznos and other work. He had earned his physical education degree from the University of Montreal and decided “to do what I love.” He works as a personal trainer and a group instructor at the Kirk YMCA in Roanoke.
At 66, he is in good physical condition, though he has had six heart attacks with six stints and a double bypass. He has been married most recently for four years and has two children and three grandkids. His son, Bryan, is a freelance contributor to The Roanoker and LifeOutside.
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