Kevin B. Blackistone

Kevin Blackistone is a former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News from September 1990 to September 2006, is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, national columnist for AOL Sports, a regular contributor to The Politico, an occasional commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and co-host of XM Satellite Radio’s Morning Tailgate each Saturday.

Blackistone also is an occasional guest on other television and radio shows around the country, including appearances on The O’Reilly Factor, Paula Zahn Now, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, ESPN’s Outside the Lines, HBO’s On the Record with Bob Costas, PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and CN8’s Out of Bounds.

 
Career

He was born in Washington, D.C. and reared in Hyattsville, Maryland. He graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1981 and started his journalism career in earnest that same year as a city reporter at The Boston Globe. In 1983, he moved to Chicago to write for The Chicago Reporter, a monthly investigative magazine on Chicago's racial and social issues. In 1986, Blackistone joined The Dallas Morning News as a reporter in the metropolitan section and later moved to the business section covering economics.

After covering Nelson Mandela's U.S. tour in 1990 on special assignment, he moved to the Morning News’ SportsDay section to cover sports business and write columns. A year later, he became a full-time SportsDay columnist. He also wrote the sports column for three years for Emerge, a monthly review of politics and culture that Time magazine hailed as an “uncompromising voice that made [it] the nation’s best black news magazine.”

Blackistone has covered each Summer Olympics since 1992, spent other summers in Europe chronicling Wimbledon, the World Cup, the Tour de France and the British Open.

He’s been at almost every NBA Finals, Final Four and national championship college football game the past 15 years, as well as a Super Bowl, numerous NFL playoff games, Major League Baseball playoff games, world championship boxing matches and other events.  He became most fond, however, of opining on the societal and historical implications of what has unfolded upon us in the sports arena.

In September 2006, Blackistone was one of 111 journalists to accept a buyout offer from The News and depart the newspaper. Dallas Morning News Editor Bob Mong, in an editorial announcing the buyouts, singled out Blackistone in writing: "His thoughtful and probing journalism almost always stimulated response from readers, and, in this hyper-busy world, that's saying something."