Malcolm Balfour enjoys a cup of tea on the dock of his Hypoluxo Island home. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
As a journalist, Hypoluxo Island’s Malcolm Balfour has pretty much done it all.
Associate editor of the National Enquirer for eight years when the tabloid was based in Lantana. Miami-based correspondent for Reuters and the now-departed United Press International. Weekend producer for one of Miami’s best-known TV stations. Longtime correspondent for The New York Post. And contributor to several nationally syndicated TV shows.
And Balfour, 85, hasn’t slowed down. His latest project is Mississippi Escape!, a book published in 2021. It reached back to his own history as a student at Mississippi State in the early ’60s, during a major turning point in the way colleges in the South dealt with Black athletes.
Coached by Babe McCarthy, the all-white MSU Bulldogs basketball team won the Southeastern Conference title four times in five seasons from 1958 to ’63, but the “unwritten law” at the time forbade any Mississippi team from playing a team with Black players.
Then a member of the track team, Balfour was affected as well. “I was eligible to compete in the NCAA championships but was not allowed because they knew Black athletes would be there,” he said.
During the 1963 NCAA basketball tournament, MSU President Dean Colvard went against the wishes of the governor and defied an injunction. The Bulldogs essentially sneaked out of Starkville to travel to East Lansing, Michigan, where they were matched in the second round against Loyola of Chicago, which had four Black starters.
“The Mississippi State guys were getting letters from the Ku Klux Klan saying they better not play against the Black guys,” Balfour said, “and the Black guys were hearing from the other side saying they shouldn’t play against the white guys. So, it was a frightening experience, but they went ahead and played and it changed everything about recruiting in the South.”
Loyola won what became known as the “Game of Change” by a 61-51 score and went on to win the NCAA championship. Meanwhile, “almost overnight,” Balfour said, Southern schools began recruiting Black athletes.
“I spent two days interviewing Dr. Colvard back in 2004 and went up to northern Kentucky to interview the captain of the team, Joe Dan Gold,” Balfour said, recalling the MSU story. “I had to get off my butt to finally put it together.”
Balfour, who served on the Lantana Town Council for nine years, and Ilona, his wife of 55 years, remain active in local politics and were major drivers behind the creation of the Lantana Nature Preserve. They have two children: Grant, a writer in the cruise ship industry, who lives in West Palm Beach; and Antonia, a doctor in Marina del Rey, California. They also have three grandchildren, Sofia, Sebastian and Scarlett.
— Brian Biggane
Q: Where did you grow up and go to school? How do you think that has influenced you?
A: I attended a rural boarding school in South Africa, then went on to Pretoria Boys High School which has many famous alumni: Max Theiler, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the vaccine for yellow fever; Michael Levitt, who also won a Nobel, for chemistry, and Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink.
I came to the U.S. on a track scholarship to Mississippi State, where I placed second in the SEC championship freshman cross-country race and we won the team championship in track. I majored in English and minored in sociology. I returned to South Africa afterward and then came back to take some graduate courses at New York University on a student visa. That opened up opportunities for me to get work up there.
Q: What professions have you worked in? What professional accomplishments are you most proud of?
A: I was working for United Press International in New York and they transferred me to the bureau in Miami, which I thought was great. Then I got an opportunity with WTVJ in Miami, where I was a writer and producer. I produced the weekend news and I was hopeless, but I lasted three years. Then I was hired by the British news service Reuters, which was the greatest thing to happen to me.
I was doing some freelance work at the time for the National Enquirer and did a story with the owner, Generoso Pope, about how it was becoming a much better publication. Reuters repeatedly wouldn’t run it but on my last try a friend ran it and the big papers in New York, Boston, Chicago all ran it on their front page. Pope was so impressed he hired me.
I stayed at the Enquirer for eight years as associate editor. They paid an incredible amount of money in those days, so much I couldn’t reject the offer. But Pope would also fire people left and right, and after making that kind of money there you couldn’t get that anywhere else.
I never became reliant on the Enquirer. I spent most of my career becoming the South Florida correspondent for The New York Post, and also did freelance work for TV shows like Inside Edition, Hard Copy and A Current Affair.
We did some things at the Enquirer that were extraordinary. Once we were covering the annual American Medical Association convention in San Francisco. I was taking six reporters with me and Pope asked how many I was taking, and he said I should take three times that many.
One of my reporters who I had hired, David Wright, came up with the story that if you have one drink a day it’s good for your heart. The AMA asked us to hold the story to run concurrently with the story running in their journal. I thought Pope would never go for it but he did, which became a feather in my cap as well.
I had my own airplane and a pilot’s license so I could fly my crew anywhere. The British papers would hire me to fly their correspondents to the Caribbean to find government officials and their girlfriends.
When the Falklands War broke out I got a call at 4 in the morning from Britain telling me to fly down there. The editor was dead serious, but it would have taken me a week to fly down there because the island was so difficult to reach, so it didn’t happen.
Q: What advice do you have for a young person seeking a career today?
A: Whatever happens, always show a positive attitude.
Q: How did you choose to make your home on Hypoluxo Island?
A: What really convinced me to buy a house on Hypoluxo Island in 1971 was the island was exactly halfway between the ocean and my job at the National Enquirer. I rode to work on my bicycle. We sold our first house after about three years because we wanted to be on the water, so in 1974 we moved to where we are now.
Q: What is your favorite part about living there?
A: Friendly neighbors and lots of trees. We’re close to the Lantana Nature Preserve so that’s a lovely place to walk.
Q: What book are you reading now?
A: At the risk of sounding like a nepotist, I’m reading my mother-in-law’s memoir, Return of the Swallows. Her name was Dorothy Praschma and her family left South Africa for Germany in 1933 to claim her husband’s rightful inheritance. What they ran into between the Soviets and the Nazis is very much like what the Russians are doing now in Ukraine. My wife, Ilona, was editor of the book.
Q: What music do you listen to when you want to relax? When you want to be inspired?
A: Blues. There’s a trail in north Mississippi going up to Memphis known as the Blues Trail and I’ve been along that. I belong to a blues club in Cleveland, Mississippi, and heard a lot of blues there.
Q: Have you had mentors in your life? Individuals who have inspired your life decisions?
A: Warren Burns, the assistant track coach at Mississippi State, was a huge help. I only had a partial scholarship so I really had no money my first year. He would give me a couple packets of cereal every morning so I’d have breakfast and lunch and sometimes even dinner. Then he got me a job on the college paper that paid me about $15 a month, and also got me a job selling programs at football games. Then after one year I got a full scholarship and he decided to concentrate on getting his master’s, so I took over as assistant coach.
Q: If your life story were to be made into a movie, who would play you?
A: Gregory Peck, if he were still alive. My wife likes him and he’s a good, handsome guy. One of my favorite movies is To Kill A Mockingbird.
Q: Who/what makes you laugh?
A: Seinfeld on TV. My wife hates him so she pretends to be asleep.
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