Steve Rushin - Career

Career

An inveterate reader of cereal-box side panels, Rushin cites as his earliest literary influences the copywriters at Kellogg's and General Mills, as well as the New York sportswriter Oscar Madison. After reading a story by Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff on the annual Gus Macker three-on-three tournament in Michigan, Rushin struck up a correspondence with Wolff. He ended up writing an anthology of sports nicknames. From A-Train to Yogi, with Wolff and Chuck Wielgus. He joined the staff of S.I. in 1988, two weeks after graduating from Marquette. Within three years, at age 25, he became the youngest Senior Writer on the SI staff. In 1991, he was shuffled back to the Twin Cities to cover hometown reaction to the North Stars' first appearance in a Stanley Cup final in 10 years. The 15,000-plus crowds that jammed the Met Center for Cup games were a shock to Rushin, who hadn't seen a crowd that large in the arena in years—and certainly not when he and the rest of the Kennedy High Class of '84 held their graduation exercises there.

Three years later Rushin spent four months writing an epic feature for S.I.'s 40th Anniversary issue. The story of his journey was divided into five parts, each exploring an essential aspect of sports in America. One section was a lament for recently razed Metropolitan Stadium, whose site became the Mall of America and housed more than 800 stores, making it the largest shopping center in the United States. "It's nauseating to think that above where Fran Tarkenton once scrambled, there's going to be an Orange Julius or a Gap," he said. Rushin's essay – How We Got Here – spanned 24 pages and remains the longest-ever article published in a single issue of S.I. At the magazine, he filed stories from Java, Greenland, the India-Pakistan border and other far- and near-flung locales. He covered the World Series, the World Cup and Wimbledon. (And those were just the Ws). He ate his way around America's ballparks ("I had watched a fat man in a minor league ballpark in Colorado Springs spoon chopped onions and pickle relish onto his jumbo frank, then turn to me, a complete stranger, and say, "Vegetables") and rode a dozen rollercoasters in a day. (Happily, those assignments were not consecutive). His weekly column, Air & Space, ran from 1998 to 2007, and was often about sports. Rushin was named the 2005 National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, and has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards.

He left S.I. in February, 2007 before returning in a contributing role in July 2010. During his time away from S.I., he wrestled three bears during the 2009 PGA Championship. He has since found a niche as an occasional contributor to Golf Digest and Time magazine, for which he writes back-page essays. He is the author of the billiards guide Pool Cool (1990), the travelogue Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into the Soul of America's Sports (1998), the collection The Caddie Was a Reindeer (2004) and the novel The Pint Man (2010). He has written numerous essays for The New York Times with memoirist and former Sports Illustrated colleague Franz Lidz. Three of them appear under the title Piscopo Agonistes in the 2000 collection Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor.