Dave Kindred

Dave Kindred was born on April 12, 1941, in Atlanta, Illinois, a farm town on old Route 66 with a population in the hundreds. He played basketball for Atlanta High School and helped it to a regional championship in 1959, then took a journalism scholarship to Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, where he also played Division III baseball. He married his high school classmate Cheryl Liesman; they were together until her death in 2021.

The newspaper career began before the degree did. From 1961 to 1965 he worked full time at The Pantagraph in Bloomington, writing and eventually columnizing for the sports section while still enrolled and for two years after. It was a small paper in a small market, which turned out to be the right place to learn to notice things.

In 1965 he moved to The Courier-Journal in Louisville, and Louisville is where the Ali thread begins. Kindred was a young writer covering a young heavyweight from the same city, and over the next decades he estimates he talked with Ali about three hundred times, in gyms, hotel rooms and living rooms on several continents. Ali’s name for him was simply “Louisville.” It was a place, not a compliment, and it stuck.

The Courier-Journal sent him to the 1972 Munich Olympics, where the sports assignment became a massacre story, and to Montreal in 1976. In the summer of 1977 The Washington Post hired him as a sports columnist; his first column was about George Allen and the Redskins. He stayed until 1984, when The Atlanta Journal-Constitution brought him south, and in 1989 he joined the staff of The National, the daily sports newspaper that Frank Deford was assembling in New York.

The National lasted about a year and a half, which was long enough for Kindred to be its best-known columnist and for the Associated Press Sports Editors to give him the Red Smith Award in 1991, during his time there. He was fifty, younger than most recipients before or since. The paper folded that June. Kindred went on to magazine work, notably at The Sporting News and then Golf Digest, where the Masters became an annual assignment he kept through retirement.

Three hundred conversations with Muhammad Ali, beginning when both were young men in Louisville.

What the award recognized was a particular kind of column: reported rather than declaimed, built from scenes, and comfortable at any length. Kindred’s writing on Ali, on Howard Cosell, on the 1972 Games and on golf reads like the work of someone who prefers to be in the room. Editors who worked with him tend to describe the copy as clean on arrival, which is the highest praise a desk gives.

His 2006 book “Sound and Fury” is a dual biography of Cosell and Ali, two men who made each other famous and never entirely trusted one another; it is the best of his long-form work. Two later books are more personal. “Leave Out the Tragic Parts” (2021) is about the death of his grandson Jared, and “My Home Team” (2023) is about the Morton, Illinois, high school girls’ basketball team, the Lady Potters.

That last subject came about because Kindred, retired and back in central Illinois, started attending Morton’s games and writing them up online for nobody in particular. He has kept at it season after season, treating a small gym with the same attention he once gave title fights. In 2019 he gave more than fifty years of notebooks, clippings and correspondence to Illinois Wesleyan’s Tate Archives and Special Collections, where students can see how the columns were built.

• 1971: General Interest National Headline Award
• 1991: Red Smith Award, Associated Press Sports Editors
• 2000: Curt Gowdy Media Award, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame
• 2007: National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame
• 2010: PGA of America Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism
• 2011: Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism
• U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame, plus multiple state and national sportswriter-of-the-year awards

It is a long list for someone who says the work he is proudest of now is done for free in a high school gym. That is not false modesty. It is a columnist who never stopped needing a beat.