A lot of things in this big world appeal to me — music and travel, consciousness and creativity in its wildest forms — but the thing I’ve been around the most over the years is sports. After more than 20 years in an enormously fun job as an editor for The Boston Globe sports pages, I left the paper and left sports entirely in order to help launch an innovative magazine for parents who like to read. I’ve since moved on from that wild Wondertime venture — and right back into sports (while also expanding into writing about the arts and even parenting as a regular contributor to the Globe).
The sport I mainly write about today is mixed martial arts. From late 2010 until the summer of 2016, I served as MMA columnist for Sports Illustrated. In 2016 I also began contributing MMA writing to The Washington Post, which I continued until 2018. I left both gigs when I took a position as part of the ESPN combat sports team, which covers MMA and boxing. I do a mix of editing and writing, often writing the big-picture reaction on fight night.
Writing about MMA has been invigorating because it put me in a front-row seat to witness a young sport and its leading promotion, the UFC, growing into the mainstream. And yet, because it’s still a niche sport, opportunities arise. As an outgrowth of my MMA writing, I got to spend five years as a regular panelist on a weekly online TV show, The MMA Beat, and have made numerous appearances on ESPN Radio and SiriusXM, along with stations around the country and podcasts around the world. I’ve also been interviewed for TV features and a documentary about the UFC’s first 20 years.
During my time away from sports, I was a founding editor of a really cool magazine called Wondertime, where for several years I wrote essays and feature stories on topics including how to raise a crazed little sports fan. (OK, so I never really left sports.) I was a new dad when I took the job, and it was fun to intertwine my home life and workday. Shortly before the magazine bit the dust in early 2009 because of the sagging economy, I won a national award for a first-person account of my experience of being in the birthing tub with my wife for the emergence of my son into this world. (I used to have a hyperlink here so you could read the story, but after deep-sixing Wondertime, the soulless suits at Disney Publishing wiped the Internet clean of any DNA evidence that the mag ever existed. Boo!)
I live in the cultural oasis of western Massachusetts with my wife, the amazing musician Sarah Swersey, and our fabulous young adult offspring, Aaron and Rex. My involvement with our local community has included weekly “Zen Sports” segments on radio station WRSI (93.9 FM in Northampton) back when Rachel Maddow was the morning DJ, and I wrote and voiced occasional commentaries on the NPR station WFCR (88.5 FM in Amherst). I also spent several fun years as host of a long-running, locally legendary American roots music program, Country, Blues & Bluegrass. I yearn for those days. Radio, radio is a sound salvation.
Jeff Wagenheim 