Professional Writing and Photography Careers
Wilstein approached the issues of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball not as a beat writer, but as a journalist with vast experience writing about those drugs in the Olympics—including seven Summer and five Winter games. He also had been a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America since 1972, covering World Series and playoff games and writing about the game throughout the year. His writing style was distinguished by its depth of detail about players and events, among them: Rickey Henderson’s romp to the stolen base record; the drug-related deaths of pitchers Eric Show and Rod Scurry; Glenn Burke’s battle with AIDS; Ted Williams’ emotional appearance at the All-Star Game shortly before his death; Kirk Gibson’s World Series homer on two injured legs; and Curt Schilling’s “bloody sock” performance in 2004 as the Boston Red Sox rose to world champions after an 86-year drought.
Wilstein interviewed and profiled all the major stars of baseball over the past three decades, as well as many from earlier eras, including Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Bobby Doerr, and Mark Koenig, who had the locker between Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on the 1927 Yankees.
Wilstein also profiled a wide range of people as a general reporter, sportswriter, business writer, foreign correspondent and columnist, including: Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi, Andy Warhol, Clint Eastwood, Edward Teller, Milton Friedman, Gen. Jimmie Doolittle, George Shultz, Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Nolan Bushnell, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Jerry West, Julius Erving, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Greg Norman, Tiger Woods, Annika Sorenstam, Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, Roger Federer, Venus and Serena Williams, Joe Montana, John Elway, Bill Walsh, John Wooden, Dean Smith, Mary Lou Retton and Dorothy Hamill. In 1994, Wilstein led the AP's award-winning coverage of the Tony Harding-Nancy Kerrigan drama.
Wilstein graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970 with a political science degree and began his career in journalism a year later working for United Press International as a sports writer from 1971 through 1978.
Wilstein covered the last third of Muhammad Ali’s career for UPI. His black and white photographs of Ali are exhibited at the Panopticon Gallery in Boston. Wilstein's color images of the Boston Red Sox have been exhibited at the Griffin Museum gallery in Boston
Wilstein left UPI to accompany his wife, Cynthia Reader Wilstein, on her three-year assignment to Kathmandu, Nepal as communications officer for UNICEF. Their daughter, Tara, was born in Kathmandu in 1980. He briefly served as a foreign correspondent for UPI in New Delhi, covering Indira Gandhi’s return to power and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He also worked as a photographer for several international organizations.
Upon returning to the United States in 1981, Wilstein joined the AP in San Francisco and later became the San Jose correspondent, covering the boom years of Silicon Valley, medical research at Stanford University, the glory years of the San Francisco 49ers and the rise of two young stars on the Oakland Athletics -- Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. In 1990, Wilstein became the AP’s national sports writer, then national sports columnist.
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