Sportswriter Without Borders

Wright Thompson is a sportswriter. Sort of.

His last piece for ESPN.com's Outside the Lines examined the political games endemic to our nation's capital—through basketball. He has revealed the terrible toll rising food prices have wrought on Ghana—and how soccer can save a lucky few. And, in a three-part, 15,000-word epic, Thompson captured one of the most important moments in American civil-rights history: James Meredith's enrollment as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962, which also happens to be the last year the Ole Miss Rebels went undefeated in football.