He tells us what it was like to slay deadline dragons, to be on a media bus that caught fire, and to hear roars at Augusta as Nicklaus makes an historic charge. He puts us with security guard Richard Jewell – a suspect later cleared – after the ’96 Olympic bombing. Mike puts us with the “Agony of Defeat” ski-jumper, with a wrestler so poor he never slept in a bed, and with speed skater Dan Jansen in heartbreak and later triumph. Hear this and more from a writer who used to spend 200 nights a year on a road. Join him now. It’s free and quite a trip.
Name a famous sporting event since the early ‘80s, and Mike Lopresti probably chronicled it. He has covered 42 Final Fours, 32 World Series, 32 Masters golf tournaments, 31 Super Bowls, 31 NBA Finals, and 16 Olympics. His credits include more than 30 Best of Gannett and Well-Done awards, the William Ringle Outstanding Achievement Career Award, the Best of Gannett 25th Anniversary Achieving Excellence in the Newsroom Award, the Jim Murray Outstanding Sportswriter Award, and the Corky Lamm Sportswriter of the Year award. Mike is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame, the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame, and the Ball State journalism Hall of Fame. Mike’s career began in the early 1970s as a high-school student working for the Palladium-Item in his hometown of Richmond, Indiana. He graduated from Ball State in 1975 and was soon writing about Major League Baseball before joining USA Today upon its launch in 1982. He worked for that paper and the Gannett News Service for 32 years until his retirement in 2013. Mike currently writes for NCAA.com, the Indianapolis Business Journal, and he’s working on a book about the 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
You can follow Mike on Twitter: @LoprestiSports