Geoff Calkins: “It Turned into a Prince Concert in the Press Conference.”

Press Box Access: A Sports History Podcast

Geoff Calkins takes us to Memphis, where he has been a high-profile fixture in the sports media scene for 27 years. He tells us about the indefatigable Hubie Brown, a voicemail from the volatile Jerry West, and what the view was like from atop John Calipari’s enemies list. Geoff explains the torture of writing on deadline at an overtime NCAA championship game. He recalls his struggles as a baseball beat reporter and what it was like to cover a Mike Tyson heavyweight championship fight. And he shares a tale involving exotic food at an Olympics. Oh my. Geoff also explains how his childhood leukemia led to writing, and why sports journalism lured him out of a career in law.

Calkins has been named the best sports columnist in the country four times by the Associated Press Sports Editors and is a member of the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame. He recently moved to general news columnist at The Daily Memphian, where he had been writing a sports column since 2018 after spending the previous 22 years as the sports columnist for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. He still hosts “The Geoff Calkins Show,” his sports radio program since 2010, five days a week. His 2016 book, “After the Jump,” chronicles how the Memphis sports scene grew over two decades.

Before moving to Memphis, Calkins covered the Florida Marlins for the Sun-Sentinel of South Florida from 1994-96, and he was a high school sports reporter at the Anniston Star in Alabama for two years. Geoff had previously been a clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, and a labor and employment attorney in Washington D.C. Switching from a law career to sports writing at age 31 eventually took Calkins to eight Olympics, multiple Super Bowls, World Series, and Masters golf tournaments. He has won various journalism awards, including a first-place honor in the 2022 APSE contest for a feature story looking back 20 years at Tyson’s loss to Lennox Lewis in Memphis.

Calkins graduated from Harvard in 1983 and from Harvard Law in ’87. He served as editor-in-chief for the school’s paper, The Harvard Independent, and worked summer internships for Time Life and the Miami Herald. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Calkins grew up outside Buffalo, New York as the eighth of nine children.

You can follow him on X: @geoff_calkins

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