He has had a front row seat at nine Olympics and six Commonwealth Games, six editions of the Tour de France, the Americas Cup, Test cricket and the world's top tennis and golfing tournaments, not to mention Aussie Rules and a host of other home-grown sports.

From Raelene Boyle to Usain Bolt, Grant Hackett to Anna Meares, the veteran journalist has witnessed some of sport's most courageous and disciplined performances.

Worthy 'champions' and 'stars' they may be, but in Reed's book, to label them 'heroes' is a term that's not only overused but overstated.

The journalist who got his start as a 17-year-old in the 1960s as a lowly assistant proof reader at the Warrnambool Standard, says it's on the battlefield, rather than the sporting field that true heroes belong.

As his latest book attests, Reed didn't have to look far to find a home-grown hero.

In War Games: a father and son memoir of war and sport Reed tells the story of his father, Bill Reed's astonishing wartime survival and the connection to the sporting tales that have defined his own career.

Few would have guessed, least of all Reed himself until much later in life, that his father, an unassuming handyman who ran the Dennington corner store in the '60s, was an atomic bomb survivor.

Along with fellow Warrnambool prisoner of war Murray Jobling, he was one of 24 Australian POWs who found themselves under the atomic bomb unleashed by the Americans on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after Hiroshima, effectively ending the Second World War.

All 24 survived to live relatively long lives. Bill had already narrowly escaped drowning when the Japanese ship, Tamahoko Maru on which he was being transferred from Taiwan to Nagasaki, was torpedoed.

As if that wasn't enough, he endured nearly five long years of deprivation and abuse as a POW under the Japanese.

Perhaps even more remarkable was his return, 40 years later to the country that held such grim memories, to offer his gratitude to one of the captors who had shown him a degree of kindness. He and Murray's 1985 reunion with Kojima Asagoro, the foreman of the Mitsubishi steel foundry where they worked as slave labour during their incarceration, was the subject of an emotional television documentary, Nagasaki Journey.

Reed, 73, still regrets that he didn't have the opportunity to accompany his father on that Nagasaki trip, or that he knew so little of what he endured until after Bill's death two years later in 1987 aged 67.

"After he died, my brother Colin was going through his stuff and found 19 hand-written pages detailing his wartime experiences." Reed recalls they'd had no idea of the account's existence.

"It was pretty emotional. I certainly hadn't thought enough about it. I knew at a young age that he'd been a POW, but I didn't really know what that meant," he says. Bill had rarely spoken of the war to his family, his physical strength and apparent mental well-being never hinting at any long-lasting trauma.

"I wish I'd had a greater understanding of what he'd been through," Reed says.

While Bill's brief memoir was too scant for a stand-alone book, the journalist devised a plan to honour his father's memory and at the same time, tell the stories of his chief sporting passion; the Olympics.

The common denominator was Japan. With nine Olympics under his belt - eight summer and one winter - Reed called time on his storied career in 2016, but he couldn't pass up the lure of one last Games - Tokyo 2020. "I wanted to do what I had not had the opportunity to do on my only previous visit to Japan, for the Winter Olympics in 1998, and that was to visit the memorial to the victims and survivors of the atomic bombing of the southern city of Nagasaki," he explains.

"My father, Private William Cecil Reed, of the 2nd/3rd Machinegun Battalion, AIF, was a prisoner of war in Nagasaki and survived that horrific event when tens of thousands of others did not.

"It seemed an appropriate segue to end my professional career by giving myself a writing assignment at a tenth Olympics just up the road, so to speak, from where it nearly all ended for me before it had even begun."

The Games' closing ceremony was scheduled for August 9, marking 75 years to the day since the bombings. It would provide a sense of closure, Reed felt. The book would be his take on the Tokyo Olympics, dovetailing with his father's memoir.

The advent of COVID-19, however, forced a major rethink. With the Games on hold for at least a year, the Tokyo component of the book evolved into a retrospective of the highlights and characters of Reed's career.

War Games chronicles some of the great sporting moments in a working life that's taken him from 17-year-old high school dropout turned Warrnambool cadet reporter, to Flinders Street, Fleet Street and beyond. For this born storyteller, it's a human-interest yarn of Carlton football great Alex Jesaulenko's long-lost brother that resonates the most.

Reed broke the story of the elder 'Jezza', believed to have died after being taken as a sickly infant from his mother in a German prison camp in 1944. Fifty years later, he was reunited, very much alive, with his incredulous mother and brother by the Red Cross.

"It was one of the best human-interest stories and certainly a story that I enjoyed writing," says Reed, whose accolades include the 1998 Australian Sportswriter of the Year and the Australian Sports Commission's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Reed's breaking 1996 news story and lucky escape from a terrorist bombing in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo is also among his more memorable. In the country to cover the cricket World Cup, he was uncomfortably close to a suicide bomb attack that killed about 90 people and injured 1400. In the fallout, the Aussies stayed away and ultimately lost the one-day Cup trophy.

The sporting devotee has had his own moments in the sporting spotlight, proving his mettle as a handy footballer and cricketer during his time in Warrnambool. Playing for WDFNL side Dennington in its first premiership in 1966, he won and also covered, the Esam Medal count for The Standard that same year. Reed played for Warrnambool in the Hampden League before moving to Melbourne. In later years, he was honoured with a spot in both the Dennington Football Netball Club and the Dennington Cricket Club's all-time best sides.

Of the many accolades he's received in his 50-plus year journalism career, Reed says perhaps the most satisfying of all was the flood of emails he received when he retired in 2016 as the Herald and Weekly Times' longest-serving employee.

"When I retired the emails didn't stop for a week. There would have been several hundred of them, including some from cricketers and footballers passing on their respects. There was a real warmness when I retired." Still writing books and for an online sports website, Reed is hoping to attend and produce a book on the eventual post-COVID Tokyo Olympics, but he concedes it's becoming "less likely by the day".