Christine Brennan

Christine Brennan was born in Toledo, Ohio, on May 14, 1958, and grew up going to games with her father, a relationship she later made the subject of a memoir, Best Seat in the House. She took both a bachelor's and a master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, and in 1981 The Miami Herald hired her as the first woman on its sports staff.

Miami in the early 1980s was a good place to learn the trade. The Hurricanes won the national championship at the Orange Bowl on the first night of 1984, and Brennan turned the season into her first book, The Miracle of Miami, the same year. That summer she covered the Los Angeles Olympics. She has been at every Summer and Winter Games since.

The Washington Post brought her north in 1985 and put her on the Redskins, making her the first woman to cover that team as a beat reporter. The Post years ran to 1997 and included Olympics, the figure-skating circuit and the general run of a large sports section. Skating turned out to be the beat that stuck. Her book on it, Inside Edge, followed a season on the Olympic figure-skating tour and was listed by Sports Illustrated in 2002 among the hundred best sports books ever written.

Every Summer and Winter Olympics since Los Angeles in 1984, and counting.

Since 1997 she has been the national sports columnist for USA Today, which for a columnist means the whole map: Olympic politics, the NFL, doping, the governance of international federations, and the running argument about where women's sports belong in the coverage. She appears as a commentator on ABC News, CNN, the PBS NewsHour and NPR, and the column and the television work feed each other.

The column has a recognizable shape. It takes a position, states it in the first paragraph, and defends it with reporting rather than adjectives, which is not the norm in a form that rewards volume. She has spent a good deal of it on the Olympic movement, which she has watched from the inside for forty years, and on the sports that get one week of attention every four years and then vanish from the page. Skaters, gymnasts and swimmers have had a columnist at a national paper for longer than most of them have been alive.

The most recent book, On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports, was published in 2025 and entered The New York Times bestseller list at number two on July 27 of that year. It is the subject she has been writing toward for four decades, arriving at a moment when the rest of the press finally caught up.

In 1988 Brennan became the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media, founded in 1987 by women who had grown tired of comparing notes about locker-room bans in hotel lobbies. She set up the organization's scholarship and internship program, which has since placed roughly two hundred students in sports departments and broadcast newsrooms. Two of the scholarships carry her parents' names. She returned as chair of the AWSM board in 2023.

The scholarship program is the part of the record that will outlast the columns. It is unglamorous work: fundraising, reading applications, calling sports editors to ask for a summer desk. The point of it was that the next woman hired onto a sports staff should not have to be the first, and by the count of two hundred alumni that point has been made many times over.

The Red Smith Award, announced in early March 2020, came a few weeks before the pandemic emptied every press box she had ever worked from. Mary Garber, who covered Winston-Salem alone for three decades, had been the first woman to receive it, in 2005. The line between them runs through the organization Brennan ran.

• Red Smith Award, Associated Press Sports Editors (2020)
• Women's Sports Foundation Billie Award for journalism, the first given (2006)
• Ohio Women's Hall of Fame
• Northwestern University Athletic Hall of Fame
• Washington, D.C. Sports Hall of Fame

Northwestern, where she took both degrees, has put her in its athletic hall of fame, which is an unusual place for a journalist to land and says something about how the university regards her. The Washington, D.C. Sports Hall of Fame did the same for the Post years.

She is still writing. This page is confined to the public record and will be updated as it grows.