From Muhammad Ali to a high school girl's team, Dave Kindred talks about inspiring second career

Longtime sportswriter Dave Kindred has covered many big sporting events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics and has written about big-name athletes like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan, but he says his biggest inspiration came from a small-town team in Illinois.

Kindred talks about the spirit and stories of covering the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team in his new memoir, "My Home Team: A Sportswriter's Life and the Redemptive Power of Small-Town Girls Basketball."

He spoke with ABC News Live's Phil Lipof about his book.

ABC NEWS LIVE: With such a legendary career covering all those iconic figures and sporting events… you were inspired to write about the Morton High School Lady Potters basketball team. Tell us how that happened.

DAVE KINDRED: I was not so much inspired is as [I was] attended a game, saw a friend's daughter play, and after 50 years of being in press boxes and at courtside, I wanted to write something. Now, I've been doing it for 14 years. I've probably written 500,000 words about this girls' basketball team, more than anything in my life, with the possible exception of Muhammad Ali.

ABC NEWS LIVE: What was it about the Lady Potters basketball team in the competition that drew you into this the way you've been drawn into pro sports?

KINDRED: Well, they were very good to start with.

These are not elite athletes. They're elite high school girls. But at the same time they have the ambition. They have the toughness. They have the drive. They want to succeed.

ABC NEWS LIVE: In the book you write, "I understood my real reason for writing about the Lady Potters. They kept me alive." You say, "Not in the sense of giving me a reason to live, but they made it possible for me to believe I existed. People I loved were gone. The newspaper work I love was gone. I refused to be gone. To be disappeared." Tell me about that feeling and what these sports-loving high school girls brought to you. Clearly having you on the sidelines once they figured out who you were and what you've done in your life and your career must have been just so cool to have you there. But what did they do for you?

KINDRED: They gave me a community.

I love newspapers. I worked for newspapers for 50 years. Newspapers went away when I wasn't ready to go away. I didn't know that at the time. I thought I was retiring, but then I discovered [the Lady Potters]. [It] gave me a community, gave me people.

I'm 82 now, but I was at an age when people were dying. My wife had a catastrophic stroke. I had a grandson who died. My mother died. I needed to be with people, and being in that small gym where I started as an athlete, that's where I started as a sportswriter. My first job -- the Bloomington Pantagraph covering high school basketball. So it was like literally going home. That's where the title came from, my home team, because it became my home team.

ABC NEWS LIVE: And we just showed video of you up there on the ladder cutting down the net, which is really cool. I want to ask you one quick question before you go. I mean, you've interviewed … Muhammad Ali. You talk about Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Super Bowls, on and on and on. I've always thought as a journalist, every time I interview someone, I learn something from that interview about myself, about the person, about journalism, and that follows me to the next interview. I'm wondering, did interviewing any of those iconic athletes help you in interviewing any of these young women?

KINDRED: Every one of them. I never treated these girls any different than I treated Ali or Jordan or Tiger. They weren't eager to answer questions. But maybe I helped them learn how to answer questions. I was asking them questions that a professional sportswriter would ask a professional basketball player. I wanted to know what happened. Why do you do that? Why do you make that spin move? Why? Why do you throw the pass out of bounds? I have some serious questions. I treated it as serious basketball. I mean, I had fun with it. I hope the girls liked it. I hope the coaches liked it. Uh, but I had fun with it, and I treated them, um, as seriously as I ever did anything.