Kim Mulkey and the art of the sports profile

A list of the best of the best.

On Saturday, before LSU women’s basketball team played its Sweet 16 game (they won), the Washington Post hit “publish” on a lengthy profile of the team’s controversial coach: Kim Mulkey.

You probably heard about the Mulkey profile before you could ever even read it. Because last week, amid rumors that the story was being prepared, Mulkey went on offense — reading a lengthy statement decrying the piece at a press conference.

“I’ve hired the best defamation law firm in the country and I’ll sue the Washington Post if they publish a false story about me,” Mulkey said.

All that Mulkey “accomplished” with that statement, which was based on nothing (since the piece hadn’t even been published), was raise the level of interest in it to stratospheric levels. (Mental note: Make sure to recruit people to badmouth stories I am writing before they get posted. It’s a sure-fire traffic winner!)

I was among that group of avidly-interested readers. The second I saw the profile — “The Kim Mulkey Way” — had been published, I stopped what I was doing and read every word. (I happened to be on the sidelines of my 11 year old’s travel basketball game at the time!)

Here’s what I found: A deeply reported, insightful look at what made Mulkey into what she is today — a lightning rod, a winner, a relentless competitor and someone about whom EVERYONE has a strongly-held opinion.

The piece was rigorously fair.

While it documented some gay athletes who played for Mulkey alleging that they didn’t always feel comfortable expressing their sexuality around her, it also quoted former gay players who said she was not homophobic in any way.

While the author — the terrific Kent Babb — spoke at length to Mulkey’s father, from whom she is estranged, he also went out of his way to note the drinking and womanizing that her dad engaged in when Mulkey was young.

It was EXACTLY the sort of journalism I love. It didn’t try to make Mulkey a saint. Or a sinner. The portrait of her was a three-dimensional one. She has tremendous good in her and she has acted, at times, poorly, even to former players who desperately wanted her attention and approval.

It’s a deeply human profile. I felt like I understood Mulkey more — why she is the way she is — after reading it. It’s the best of what sports journalism (and journalism more generally) can do.

After I read it, I spent some time thinking about other profiles — of athletes, coaches etc. — that I felt the same way about. That taught me something fundamental about who these people are (or were). I also put out a call on Twitter X for ideas about the best sports profiles ever.

The list is below. I tried to range across decades and sports.

I hope you enjoy reading (or re-reading) these as much as I did. Did I miss a classic profile? Throw it in the comments section and I will update this list!

• “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee in the New Yorker (1965). This profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton is, to my mind, the sports profile to which all others should be compared. It presaged all that would come in Bradley’s remarkable life: The NBA success. Elected to the Senate from New Jersey. A presidential bid. Remarkable stuff.

• “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” by Richard Ben Cramer in Esquire (1986). No one could get inside peoples’ heads better than Richard. (His “What It Takes” book about the 1988 presidential campaign remains the single best work of campaign non fiction ever written.) And no one’s head had more going on in it than Williams. A brilliant profile of a deeply complex man.

• “Would You Let This Man Interview You?” by Myron Cope for Sports Illustrated (1967). It’s hard to explain to young people just how famous (and infamous!) Howard Cosell was back in the days. Yes, he was a sports broadcaster but he was so much more too. Cope plumbs the depths of the most famous voice in sports history.

• “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch” by George Plimpton for Sports Illustrated (1985). Sidd Finch might have thrown a baseball harder than any other human — ever. And that may be the least interesting thing about the former Mets pitcher. Also, George Plimpton!

• “The Rabbit Hunter” by Frank DeFord for Sports Illustrated (1981). Frank DeFord on, well, pretty much anything was must-read stuff for me as a kid. But this profile of then Indiana men’s basketball coach Bobby Knight is among his finest work. This is the definitive profile of one of the most brilliant and flawed men to ever roam the coaching sidelines. I mean this Knight quote alone makes the whole thing worth it: “I just don't have the personality that connotes humor.”

• “The Secret History of Tiger Woods” by Wright Thompson for ESPN (2016). How the hell do you find a new angle — or something new to say — about one of the most famous athletes EVER? Leave it to Thompson who is, for my money, the single best profile writer alive today. You will leave this profile feeling both sorry for and angry at Woods — for what he did and what he failed to do.

• “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” by John Updike for the New Yorker (1950). Updike. Ted Williams’ final game. The ghosts haunting the Red Sox. What it means — and what it takes — to be the best. How (and when) to call it quits on your own terms. It’s ALL in this piece.

• “Stealing Time” by David Grann for the New Yorker (2005). Rickey Henderson, the all-time base stealing leader, would often speak about himself in the third person. He seemed to have little sense that other people even existed. Grann, who has written a slew of best-sellers, let Henderson talk (and talk) for this profile. The result is brilliant.

• “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience” by David Foster Wallace for the New York Times (2006). It took a novelist to capture the lyricism of watching Federer play tennis. I love this description from Foster Wallace on what he is trying to do in the profile: “The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ’06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a ‘bloody near-religious experience.’”

• “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness” by Tony Kornheiser for Sports Illustrated (1983). Rick Barry was one of the great NBA players. And no one liked him. The portrait painted by Tony of Barry as a tortured genius became definitional. It was who he was. Now that’s a powerful profile.

• “Heaven Help Marge Schott” by Rick Reilly for Sports Illustrated (1986). If you are of a certain age (and I am of that age), Marge Schott was, at one time, the most famous (or, really, infamous) owner in all of pro sports. Reilly captured her perfectly in this profile. I mean, the lede alone: “Alone in her bedroom, alone in a 40-room mansion, alone on a 70-acre estate, Marge Schott finishes off a vodka-and-water (no lime, no lemon), stubs out another Carlton 120, takes to her two aching knees and prays to the Men.”

• “Bitter rivals. Beloved friends. Survivors.” by Sally Jenkins for the Washington Post (2023). Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert MADE women’s tennis. Their rivalry. Their greatness. Their seeming dissimilarity. Sally breaks down the decades-long friendship between the women in a piece that is heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure.

• “Ladies and Gentleman, Ian Eagle” by Bryan Curtis for The Ringer (2024). This coming weekend, at age 55 and for the first time, Ian Eagle will be the play-by-play man for CBS at the men’s Final Four. It’s been a long and strange trip — and Curtis’ tells the story with novelistic flair.