A lot of things in this big world appeal to me — music and travel and 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 for five years. But now I’m back in sports and back at The Globe . . . at least part of the time. I returned to New England’s biggest daily newspaper in 2010 as a correspondent contributing arts features, and I’ve since begun to also write about college football, basketball and hockey.
The sport I mainly write about, however, is mixed martial arts, though not for The Globe. Since late 2010 I’ve served as MMA columnist for Sports Illustrated‘s online site. This is the writing job that takes up most of my time, and the one that’s been most invigorating as I have a front-row seat for watching a young sport and its leading promotion, the UFC, grow into the mainstream.
During my time away from sports, I was a founding editor of the parenting magazine Wondertime, where for several years I wrote essays and feature stories on topics such as 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 work day. Shortly before the magazine bit the dust in early 2009, I won a national award for a (sort of) first-person account of the birth of my son. (I used to have a hyperlink here so you could read the story, but after deep-sixing Wondertime the empty suits at Disney wiped the Internet clean of any DNA evidence that the mag ever existed.)
I live in the western Massachusetts oasis of Northampton with my wife, Sarah, and two kids. When I’m not typing something up for one of the above media outlets, I’m hunting-and-pecking an essay or short story or something else for fun. Some of these end up as Friday morning news commentaries on New England Public Radio, WFCR (88.5 FM in Amherst, Mass.). I’m also on the radio on weekends, as several years ago I took over as host of a long-running, legendary American roots music program. Country, Blues & Bluegrass airs Sundays from 1-3 p.m. on the Happy Valley’s listener-supported FM station, WMUA (91.1 in Amherst, streaming live at wmua.org). Radio is a blast.
