Sunday’s ‘60 Minutes’ features former Kentucky sports columnist Dave Kindred
Last summer when the subject of renaming Rupp Arena was raised, I gave a call to Dave Kindred, the former Courier Journal sports columnist who covered the famous Kentucky basketball coach on Kindred’s path to becoming one of the nation’s greatest sports columnists.
The podcast, which you can listen to here, remains one of our most popular. And in the podcast, Dave talked about his life now as a retiree (sort of) back in his home state of Illinois, where he has written extensively about the Morton High School girls’ basketball team.
CBS’ 60 Minutes has done a piece on exactly that, which airs Sunday night, March 28, 2021. The segment spotlights how the acclaimed sportswriter, who has covered multiple Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours and major golf tournaments, came to cover a girls’ high school basketball team.
“’60 Minutes’ usually has a mix of segments that can make you angry or smile. The one on Dave Kindred will make you smile,” said show correspondent and Sports Illustrated executive editor Jon Wertheim, who spent three days in central Illinois in February doing reporting work on Kindred.
Kindred, 79, is a native of Atlanta, Illinois, and graduate of Illinois Wesleyan. He was sports columnist for the Courier Journal, the Washington Post and Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has written for The Sporting News and Golf Digest, as well as authoring multiple books, including “Sound and Fury” about the relationship between Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell.
[60 Minutes: Dave Kindred finds his most fulfilling work]
As Dave told me last year, his latest book is about his late grandson, Jared Kindred, who lived as a transient before losing his life to alcoholism at age 25. The book, entitled “Leave Out the Tragic Parts” with the subtitle “A grandfather’s search for a boy lost to addiction” was published Feb. 2.
“Though his deep and unconditional love for his grandson may have contributed to some denial about Jared’s illness early on in the disease, eventually he came to have a deep understanding of the entire process. As a result of his appreciation and acceptance of what took place, readers are also led to have a deeper understanding of the addictive and debilitating disease of alcoholism,” wrote Laura Schultz in the New York Journal of Books.
“In another sector of his career, Kindred is a nationally acclaimed sports writer. Thus it is appropriate to say that in sports vernacular, many readers will view Leave Out the Tragic Parts as a true home run.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2021 at 11:24 AM.
