2019 Sports Award Honoree: Mike Sielski

SpOrtS award - 2019 hOnOree Mike Sielski

A star in the sports journalism world, Mike Sielski is a columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of two books. The first, Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood from the Football Field to the Fields of Honor, was released in 2009 and received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Booklist called it “an emotionally charged book that offers a profound understanding of American life in the first years of the twenty-first century.” Sielski’s first book—How to Be like Jackie Robinson: Life Lessons from Baseball’s Greatest Hero, which he co-authored with longtime NBA executive Pat Williams—was published in 2005.

Forty four years old, an alumnus of La Salle University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Sielski is one of the most literate and insightful journalists in the nation, and his writing stretches beyond sports into the realms of culture, politics, and American history. The Associated Press Sports Editors voted him the country’s best sports columnist in 2015 and has selected him as one of the country’s 10 best in four of the last five years, and since joining The Inquirer in 2013, he has established himself as the most recognized and respected voice in a city and a region where sports is not a pastime but a civic religion. Over the past decade, Sielski’s work has been anthologized twice in the annual Best American Sports Writing series, and he has received more than forty other national and state awards from organizations such as the United States Basketball Writers Association, the American Association of Sunday & Features Editors, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the Society of Professional Journalists.

Before The Inquirer hired him, Sielski spent more than three years as a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, covering the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Hockey League as part of the paper’s push to change the nature of daily sports journalism. He also has written for ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports, and Deadspin—three of the most read sports websites in the United States—and has established a recognizable presence on national television and radio, including on ESPN, The NFL Network, The NBC Sports Network, and National Public Radio. While working in the Philadelphia market, he has appeared regularly on the region’s two top-rated sportstalk stations, 94.1 FM WIP and 97.5 FM The Fanatic, and he is a contributor to NBC Sports Philadelphia, the region’s only 24-hour all-sports TV network.

Sielski lives in Bucks County, Pa., with his wife, Kate, and their sons, Evan and Gabe. His paternal grandmother, Antoinette (Bello) Sielski, was a second-generation Italian American.