In 30+ years at The Washington Post, I wrote about the many ways sports thrill, edify and sometimes horrify us, and most of all, how they explain us. I covered six Olympics, traveled to four continents and more than a dozen countries. I interviewed a sitting president in the Oval Office. I chronicled the end of Cal Ripken's career and the beginning of Bryce Harper's. I watched Usain Bolt's family harvest sugar cane in deepest Jamaica. Josh Hamilton took me on a driving tour of the places where he used to shoot up. Dusty Baker cooked me some collard greens.
Among the many awards I have won, I am proudest of the 2019 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing, arguably the highest honor in our humble profession. I had a hell of a run, and it might have gone on forever if not for the Great WaPo Lay-off Bloodbath of February 2026.
One of the biggest throughlines of my career has been music. I profiled Neil Diamond for the Style section. And I turned the intersection of music and sports into a mini-beat, writing about the integration of music in the stadium experience and the Welsh folk song that became an anthem for the country's 2022 World Cup team. Perhaps best of all, I commandeered a piano in a concert hall to play through some of the best sports theme songs of all-time in order to illustrate, on video, what makes them so great.
But music is more than an interest for me. I'm also a songwriter, guitarist and pianist. I trained as an opera singer at Vanderbilt, then performed for the Florida Grand Opera for three years while covering golf, college football and baseball for The Miami Herald. Later in life, I released two critically praised albums of original songs that lie somewhere between power pop and Americana, 2018's "First Thing Tomorrow" and 2021's "The Measure of Things" (both available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music or anywhere you stream music).