Wright Thompson

Wright Thompson
Born (1976-09-09) September 9, 1976
Clarksdale, Mississippi
Occupation journalist
Citizenship American
Alma mater University of Missouri
Subject sports, society

Wright Thompson (born September 9, 1976) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He formerly worked at The Kansas City Star and Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Thompson's topics have covered a wide range of sports issues, from football, basketball, and baseball, to car racing, sports history, Father's Day, and bullfighting. Thompson also covered the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup in the subcontinent of India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

Early life and education

Thompson is a native of Clarksdale in northern Mississippi, the son of Mary Thompson. His late father, Walter Wright Thompson, an attorney, played a pivotal role in Clarksdale's emergence as a tourist destination based on blues music. The senior Thompson was an ardent Democrat who was the Mississippi finance chairman for the 1984 John Glenn presidential campaign. He later supported Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton in their campaigns against George Herbert Walker Bush.

Career

Thompson started his sportswriting career while a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia, having covered Missouri sports and writing as a columnist for the School of Journalism's Columbia Missourian.

Between his junior and senior years, he interned at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and later was the LSU beat writer there. He later moved to the Kansas City Star, where he covered a wide variety of sports events including Super Bowls, Final Fours, The Masters, and The Kentucky Derby.

In 2006, he assumed full-time writing duties at ESPN.com.

In 2008, after watching the University of Alabama narrowly defeat Louisiana State University in a home game in Baton Rouge, Thompson described Tiger Stadium as "the best place in the world to watch a sporting event."[1]

His 2010 article Ghosts of Mississippi inspired the 2012 ESPN 30 for 30 series documentary film The Ghosts of Ole Miss (which Thompson narrated),[2] about the 1962 football team's perfect season and concurrent violence and rioting over integration of the segregated university by James Meredith.[3] He also narrated the ESPN 30 for 30 film Roll Tide/War Eagle.

Bibliography (selected)

Boxing

Auto racing

Football

Basketball

Baseball

Cricket

Sports History / Issues

Fathers Day

Bullfighting

References

  1. ↑ Chet Hilburn, The Mystique of Tiger Stadium: 25 Greatest Games: The Ascension of LSU Football (Bloomington, Indiana: WestBow Press, 2012), p. 7
  2. ↑ Thompson, Wright (February 2010). "Ghosts of Mississippi". Outside the Lines. ESPN. Retrieved November 3, 2012.
  3. ↑ Thompson, Wright (October 30, 2012). "'Ghosts' a story of family, home". ESPN Films. ESPN.com. Retrieved November 3, 2012.
  4. ↑ http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=matador

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/30/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.