SAN DIEGO (CNS) — Bryce Miller, a decade-long San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist, former Des Moines Register sports editor and avid outdoorsman, has died at 56.
Miller passed away Saturday after a two-year battle with bladder cancer, according to multiple media reports.
On July 11, 2023, the day of Major League Baseball's All-Star Game, a biopsy revealed muscle-invasive bladder cancer, Miller wrote in a Union-Tribune article.
A native of Redfield, Iowa, and University of Iowa graduate, Miller had worked as a sports columnist at the Union-Tribune since October 2015 and served as sports editor at the Des Moines Register from 2005 to 2012 before moving into a columnist role. He also worked for USA Today in Arlington, Virginia, and as a sports reporter and sports editor at the Iowa City Press-Citizen.
Miller's career spanned 35 years, and included coverage of six Olympics, the World Series and MLB All-Star Games, Final Four, Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, college football championship, Rose Bowl, NFL playoffs, U.S. Open and PGA Championship.
Reporters who worked with Miller said he challenged them to bring their best work every day, and cared deeply about readers and his colleagues. The Union-Tribune said Miller traveled to Mexico City twice, the Dominican Republic, Seoul, Korea, Japan and Africa during his time with the newspaper.
Referring to his career in journalism, Miller once wrote in an article for the Union-Tribune, "Quickly, it hit me. Do a job like this long enough and you'll find yourself asking people to share the most intimate and profound moments of their lives with a relative stranger. Drug overdoses. Suicide. Heart disease. Gun violence. Cancer."
Miller wrote that his bout with cancer "started with a mean-spirited kidney stone a few weeks after covering San Diego State's thrilling run in the NCAA Tournament. Throbbing lower-back pain spiked when it damn well felt like it, causing sleep to pinball from fitful to near impossible."
He was covering the Kentucky Derby when a urologist called Miller to tell him he saw something "sinister" on a hazy X-ray.
"In less than a month, I underwent three outpatient surgeries that included the installation of two stents connecting the bladder and kidneys. A four-day trip to the emergency room for something called bladder irrigation ratcheted up the chaos," Miller said in an article for the Union-Tribune in August 2023.
Miller wrote that after his diagnosis, his younger brother Brian flew to San Diego to be with him, neighborhood friends bombarded him with casseroles, and his mailbox bulged with funny T-shirts and handwritten cards, with buoying text messages landing by the dozens and moistening his eyes.
"Cancer is the party crasher who refuses to leave," he wrote.
"Interview a baseball player. Fill out a medical form. Research sports statistics. Hustle to a CT scan. Make a lab appointment. File a column. Juggling skyrockets up the list of critical skills."
Miller is survived by his mother Bea Winters, brothers Bruce and Brian Miller and several step-siblings.
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