Mitch Albom

Most readers now meet Mitch Albom on a bookshelf. The Associated Press Sports Editors met him earlier, on the sports page of the Detroit Free Press, where he has been the lead columnist since 1985. Before the novels and the memoirs he was, by the A.P.S.E.'s own count, the best sports columnist in the United States thirteen times, and the best feature writer seven times. No one else has come close to either total.

The 2010 Red Smith Award recognized that body of work. It came when Albom was fifty-two, younger than most recipients, which reflected less a hurry on the committee's part than the fact that the columns had been piling up for a quarter of a century.

Mitchell David Albom was born in Passaic, New Jersey, on May 23, 1958. He took a sociology degree at Brandeis in 1979, spent a stretch trying to make a living as a musician, and then went to Columbia for a master's in journalism and an M.B.A. He freelanced, worked briefly in Florida and joined the Free Press in 1985. Detroit was in one of its long stretches of bad news and worse teams; the column gave both a voice.

He covered the Pistons of the Bad Boys era, the Red Wings' return to the Stanley Cup and Michigan's Fab Five, and he wrote the kind of long features on ordinary people that the A.P.S.E. kept singling out. Radio followed, on WJR in Detroit, and a regular chair on ESPN's The Sports Reporters.

His first books were sports books. Bo, written with the Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler, appeared in 1989, and Fab Five, on the Michigan basketball recruiting class that reached two national title games as underclassmen, in 1993. Both were competent, well-reported and unremarkable as publishing events. Nothing in them suggested what would happen to the author's career four years later.

In 1997 he published Tuesdays with Morrie, an account of his weekly visits with a dying former professor, Morrie Schwartz. It sold in the tens of millions and stayed on the bestseller lists for years. The Five People You Meet in Heaven followed in 2003, then For One More Day, Have a Little Faith, The Time Keeper, The First Phone Call from Heaven, The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto and a run of others through The Little Liar in 2023.

Thirteen times the best sports columnist in the country, by the count of the people who give the award.

The books made him one of the best-selling authors in the world, and some sportswriters grumbled that he had left the trade. He had not. The Free Press column continued through all of it, which is the part of the record the Red Smith Award is about.

Albom founded S.A.Y. Detroit in 2006, an umbrella for charities serving the city's poorest residents, and operates the Have Faith Haiti mission and orphanage in Port-au-Prince, which he has run since 2010 and about which he wrote Finding Chika in 2019. A Hole in the Roof Foundation, which repairs the buildings of faith groups that shelter the homeless, is his as well.

He was inducted into the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 2017. He lives in the Detroit area, still writes for the Free Press and still hosts on WJR. This page covers the public record only.