Bill Kwon had the kind of ebullient wit that allowed him to look back at a devastating hip injury that hospitalized him in a body cast and proclaim it as his “lucky break.”

Without the childhood fall from a cabinet and awkward landing that resulted in more than a dozen surgeries, Kwon reasoned he might never have found the path that led him to more than a half-century as one of Hawaii’s preeminent, pace-setting sports writers.

Kwon, who died Wednesday morning at age 81, liked to say that “it’s not often you can say that the best job in the world was your only job.”

In a career that spanned the beginning of statehood to the digital age, Kwon chronicled the heyday of boxing here, the golden period of local high school football, the rise of women’s sports, the ascendance of the University of Hawaii and emergence of the state as a TV sports destination.

“I think he was one of the true giants of sports in Hawaii,” said former UH football coach Dick Tomey. “He’s somebody that I will never forget.”

Rainbow Wahine volleyball coach Dave Shoji said, “He had the pulse of what was going on around town in sports, high school, UH, you name it. I thought he was a fabulous writer; he seemed to be right on with his stories.”

Former UH basketball coach Riley Wallace said, “He loved UH basketball, all the UH sports, really.”

Mostly, Kwon delighted in just meeting people and telling their stories.

And he met and told plenty, those of Muhammad Ali, Pele, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods among them, in a career that sent him to five Super Bowls, six World Series and three Olympiads.

But golf, which Star-Bulletin colleague Bill Gee introduced him to, became a passion and calling card and a jaunty ivy-style flat cap his trademark.

“It was hard walking around the golf course at the (Hawaiian or Sony) Open with Bill because he seemed to know everybody and all of them wanted to talk to him,” said Mark Rolfing, a TV golf analyst for NBC and the Golf Channel. “He was an icon.”

“Maybe it is because I just came from Latrobe, Pa., and Arnold Palmer’s funeral, but I can’t help seeing a lot of Palmer in Bill,” Rolfing said. “He (Kwon) was such a great people person, a gentle man and such a great listener. When he talked to you, you never got the feeling he was looking through you and in a hurry to get on to something else. In that way they were a lot alike.”

Kwon got his first taste of the newspaper business as a 6-year old on a Pua Lane corner hawking the Star-Bulletin’s extra “War” edition hours after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

In less than five minutes, he sold them all. “With 50 cents in my pocket, this six-year old Palama boy felt rich,” Kwon would write later, adding, “(I) wished, though, I had kept one of them. Imagine what a mint copy of the newspaper headlining America’s entry into World War II would be worth on eBay today.”

At that point he still hoped to become an athlete, a dream that was dashed the next year when the precocious seven-year old took the fateful fall at home that had him in and out of hospitals.

Listening to the radio broadcast of the 1942 World Series between the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals from a bed at Shriners Hospital, Kwon decided that if he couldn’t be an athlete he would do the next best thing and someday write about them.

He forecast as much to a nurse on duty, Faith Nakano. She would marvel at both his youthful prescience and long-haul persistence when they crossed paths again 50 years later.

In time Kwon worked on newspapers at his alma maters, Roosevelt High and the UH, eventually landing a part-time position and then full-time job in the Star-Bulletin sports department. He went on to become sports editor and a columnist for the paper, where he served for 42 years.

He would be the last of a foundation-setting group, including Monte Ito, Gee, and Andrew Mitsukado, who brought local sports writing from the statehood period into an era of rising college and pro sports popularity.

After his 2001 “retirement,” Kwon moved across the hall in the News Building, spending nearly 10 years writing the “Around the Greens” golf column for the Advertiser.

Not until the papers merged in 2010 did Kwon return to being, as he put it in an aloha column, “just a sports fan — like the kid in Shriners Hospital back in 1942.”

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.