Alexander Wolff spent 36 years at Sports Illustrated, leaving after the 2016 Rio
Olympics as the longest tenured writer on staff. SI assignments took him to six
continents and involved sports from basketball to soccer to tennis to offshore powerboat
racing, as well as such issues at the intersection of sports and society as race, gender,
drugs, the environment, science, business, food, armed conflict, and style. He is the
author or co-author of eight books about basketball, including the New York
Times bestseller Raw Recruits and Big Game, Small World, which was named a New
York Times Notable Book. His historical memoir Endpapers: A Family Story of Books,
War, Escape, and Home was published last month. In 2002, as a Ferris Professor of
Journalism, he taught a writing seminar at Princeton, Humanities 444, called Writing
About Sports and the Wider World. In format and spirit, it was very similar to Hum 406,
The Literature of Fact, the course he took with Rob Goldberg in the Spring of 1977.
Rob Goldberg is a Writer / Producer for dozens of documentaries on National
Geographic, PBS, Discovery, History, NBC, MSNBC, A&E, ESPN, and other networks –
on everything from King Tut and the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the secrets of
Renaissance Florence, from the rise of ISIS to the fall of El Chapo. He has been
nominated for multiple Emmys and at least one Father of the Year award.
Rob is also the bestselling co-author of the nonfiction books Anchors: Brokaw,
Jennings, Rather and the Evening News and Citizen Turner. He is the former TV and
Media Critic of the Wall Street Journal, and over the years has contributed to
publications including the New York Times, Vogue, Playboy, Sports Illustrated
and Vanity Fair.
Rob has been working hard during this COVID year. He’s just sent two TV pilots off to
his agent, and is hoping for the best. He is also the co-author of the upcoming
novel, The Hanged Man’s Tale, due out on Doubleday’s Nan Talese imprint at the end
of the year.
And yes, he has very fond memories of that Literature of Fact class Alex is talking
about.
