Alexander Wolff
Alexander Wolff has been on the staff of Sports Illustrated since 1980. In addition to covering basketball at all levels, he has written from the Olympics, soccer’s World Cup, every Grand Slam tennis event, and the Tour de France. SI story assignments have taken him to such countries as China, Cuba and Iran, and dealt with such issues at the intersection of sport and society as race, ethnicity, gender, drugs, the environment, education, youth development, business, conflict and ethics, as well as cultural themes like style, food and the media.
Wolff is the author or co-author of six books about basketball, including Raw Recruits (Pocket Books, 1990, with Armen Keteyian), a New York Times bestseller that examined college basketball recruiting; and Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure (Warner Books, 2002), an account of a year spent chasing the game around the globe to take the measure of its impact, which the New York Times Book Review named a Notable Book.
Wolff’s writing for Sports Illustrated has been honored with multiple appearances in The Best American Sports Writing. In 1996 he and Hoop Dreams filmmakers Peter Gilbert and Steve James collaborated on Team of Broken Dreams, an Emmy-nominated documentary short that detailed the impact of the Yugoslav crisis on basketball players from the Balkans. As a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton in 2002 he taught an undergraduate seminar called Writing About Sports and the Wider World. In 2010 he served as commencement speaker at Springfield College, and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame honored him with its 2011 Curt Gowdy Media Award for contributions to the game as a print journalist.
He and his wife, Vanessa, live in Addison County, Vt., with their son and daughter.