BIO
Photo by Neenah Ellis
Stefan Fatsis is an author, reporter and familiar voice to public-radio listeners nationwide.
He has written three books, all with long subtitles. A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-foot-8, 170-pound, 43-year-old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL (The Penguin Press, July 2008) is the Plimptonian story of his summer as a training-camp placekicker for the Denver Broncos. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (Houghton Mifflin, 2001; Penguin, 2002), chronicled the twisted subculture of the quintessentially American board game and the author’s descent into it. Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America’s Heartland (Walker, 1995) followed a troupe of antiestablishment baseball entrepreneurs and their nose-thumbing creation, the Northern League.
Word Freak spent a dozen weeks on the New York Times extended bestseller list, and was a Times business bestseller and a Times Notable Book of 2001 and 2002. It was named the No. 2 nonfiction book of 2001 by Entertainment Weekly, and made the bestseller lists of the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and the American Booksellers Association. Word Freak was optioned by Academy Award-winning director Curtis Hanson, spawned several documentaries and helped prompt the first-ever television coverage of tournament Scrabble. Fatsis has been the writer and color commentator for ESPN’s telecasts of the 2003 Scrabble All-Stars Championship, the 2004, 2005, and 2006 National Scrabble Championship, and the 2007 and 2008 National School Scrabble Championship. Really.
A Few Seconds of Panic was named a top book of 2008 by the Washington Post and Sports Illustrated.
Fatsis began his career in the late 1970s reporting on soccer and ice hockey games (in which he played) for the Pelham Sun in his hometown of Pelham, N.Y. As a high-school senior with an as-yet-unreformed New York accent, he was actually permitted to read the news on a local commercial radio station, WVOX. At The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, he compulsively amassed hundreds of bylines, dropped out of school to be an editor, started a summer weekly and wrote a story about squash to get a byline on the sports page. Fatsis toured the eastern seaboard for summer internships at the New Haven Register, Providence Journal and Miami Herald, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor in charge of hiring told him he was an “insecure overachiever,” just what the paper liked.
In 1985, Fatsis declined a job covering a Miami suburb and bought a one-way ticket to Athens, Greece, land of his ancestors. He was hired by the Associated Press at the rate of $13 a day. He stayed in Athens almost two years, covering terrorist bombings of a TWA jet, a statue of Harry Truman and a synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey; Albanian refugees tunneling under border fences; and Greek basketball and soccer. An Athens newspaper labeled him a turncoat for writing that the city didn’t have a prayer of hosting the 100th-anniversary Olympics in 1996. After returning to the U.S., Fatsis reported from AP bureaus in Philadelphia and Boston before joining the wire service’s business desk in New York to cover Wall Street and the financial scandals of the late 1980s and early ’90s. For breaking news of Michael Milken’s decision to plead guilty to securities crimes, he received a deadline-writing citation and dinner at a fancy restaurant.
After quitting the AP to write Wild and Outside, Fatsis was hired by The Wall Street Journal in 1995 to cover sports (and, for a short time, residential real estate). He filed dozens of page-one stories examining issues from the rise of Yao Ming to the dangers of aluminum baseball bats to the dwindling use of pads by supersized NFL players to the scandal-filled career of a college basketball coach to the dearth of single-digit uniform numbers among big-league pitchers. Fatsis succeeded the great Frederick C. Klein as author of the paper’s On Sports column, and was happiest reporting on team handball and Greek baseball at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, curling and Nordic combined and misplaced priorities at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, and soccer’s code of honor and American fans at the 1998 World Cup in France.
Fatsis began talking on National Public Radio in 1997, on the short-lived show “Early Morning Edition.” He became the regular sports commentator on NPR’s flagship newsmagazine “All Things Considered” just before the Super Bowl in 1998. Since then, he has blabbed “most Fridays” about “sports and the business of sports” with every host of the show except his wife, Melissa Block. For NPR, he also has profiled Scrabble inventor Alfred Butts, recited the two-letter Scrabble words, and appeared on the shows “Talk of the Nation,” “Weekend Edition Saturday” and “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” among others. He’s been a talking head on CNBC, ESPN, and a bunch of other networks.
Fatsis’s work has appeared in two collections. In The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything (Bloomsbury, 2007), he created a 32-word NCAA-style tournament to determine the best Scrabble word. A biography of his baseball glove—a Rawlings XPG6 model bought in the spring of 1977—appears in the anthology Anatomy of Baseball (SMU Press, 2008). He also has written for the New York Times, that paper’s (sadly defunct) Play magazine, Sports Illustrated, Slate, Deadspin, Kissing Suzy Kolber and No Mas.
Fatsis graduated from Penn in 1985 with a degree in American civilization. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their daughter, Chloe.
