Michael Leahy (author)

Michael Leahy
File:Michael Leahy.jpg
Occupation	Author, Journalist
Genre	Nonfiction
Notable works	When Nothing Else Matters Hard Lessons

Michael Leahy is an author and award-winning writer for The Washington Post and The Washington Post Magazine. He is best known for his second book, When Nothing Else Matters, which chronicles basketball superstar Michael Jordan's last comeback to the NBA. Leahy's stories have also been selected for the 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 editions of The Best American Sports Writing anthologies. His first published book, Hard Lessons, follows the lives of six Beverly Hills High School students, class of 1986, and deals with the challenges and anxieties of teenage life in modern America.

Early Life

Leahy was born in Newark, New Jersey. At age 10, he moved with his family to a suburb of Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of Yale University.

Career

A highly regarded feature writer known for his intimate portraits of subjects, Leahy explores everything from social issues to sports. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and his work has appeared in Playboy Magazine and Sports Illustrated.

Leahy has published two non-fiction books: Hard Lessons (1988) and When Nothing Else Matters (2004), which was heralded by GQ Magazine as "the best sports book of the year."

Along the way, he has written about subjects as wide-ranging as presidential politics, rural poverty, obesity in the American South, malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, the housecleaner dubbed fisherman-savior of Elian Gonzalez, the Army’s recruiting efforts amid the specter of the Iraq war, corporate scandals, a nudist camp, his mother’s struggles with Alzheimer’s, and the playing comeback of basketball legend Michael Jordan in Washington.

Awards

• His story on the life of a paroled child murderer spared execution in the early '70s because of a Supreme Court decision that briefly rendered the death penalty unconstitutional won the Washington D.C. Society of Professional Journalists’ best feature story award.

• In 2006, his Washington Post Magazine story about a single mother from Massachusetts who took her two young children across the country to meet their father – a sperm donor known to the woman for years only as Donor 929 – won honors from the Society of Professional Journalists as the best magazine story in the country for that year.

• His sports work has been selected four times for The Best American Sports Writing anthologies, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, which annually features the 25 best sports stories in the nation.

Reviews

When Nothing Else Matters

When Nothing Else Matters (2004)
Hardback Cover

• Steven J. Lyons, Chicago Sun-Times: "The Nexus at which the decline in Jordan's physical prowess and public image converge is deftly and devastatingly captured in Michael Leahy's When Nothing Else Matters. The staff writer for The Washington Post goes beyond the easy recounting of the familiar into a depth that is thought-provoking and engaging."

• Allen St. John, The Washington Post: "At its best, When Nothing Else Matters is the fourth act of a Shakespeare play....Jordan is Macbeth in high tops....When Nothing Else Matters tells the gripping tale of an aging superstar moving reluctantly from the one place where he was in complete control to a world where the rules weren't as clear cut."

• Dan McGrath, Chicago Tribune: "Riveting, myth-shattering."

• Jon Ward, The Washington Times: "Michael Leahy has written a heck of a book....Mr. Leahy combines an unrelenting eye for detail with extraordinary big-picture analysis."

• Ron Rapoport, Chicago Sun-Times: "When Nothing Else Matters gives us the best look we are likely to have of Jordan in decline....The result is a richly detailed, anecdote-driven account of one of the most famous men in the world approaching the end of his rope."

• Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club: "Incisive...Michael Leahy reveals a great deal about Michael Jordan's inglorious stint with the Washington Wizards, but he reveals even more about the back-scratching culture of sports journalism, which allows flawed figures like Jordan to balloon into false idols."

• Tom Scocca, New York Observer: "When Nothing Else Matters is a close-up portrait of an aging star's vanity, a cold-blooded case study in organizational politics...a scathing media criticism."

• John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "A gripping behind-the-scenes book....An important corrective to our current celebrity culture."

• Dave Hannigan, The Sunday Times (London): "[An] exceptional book. It says much about the cozy relationship enjoyed by elite athletes and the journalists who routinely cover them that it took a nonsports writer to produce the most telling insight into this twentieth-century icon."

• Michael Sokolove, author of The Ticket Out: "Leahy is that most unwelcome of characters around a pro sports team: a truth-teller. Where others were intimidated by Michael Jordan, or just plain blinded by his star power, Leahy stood his ground and assembled a tough-minded, fair and gripping account that reveals something far more interesting than Michael Jordan the icon--he gives us Jordan, the man."

• Glenn Stout, series editor of The Best American Sports Writing series: "Michael Leahy may be the first author to overcome his awe of Michael Jordan and let us see another Jordan, the legend in the autumn of his career. In this book we don't just meet the myth streaking across the sky--we meet a very human being finally returning to earth. When Nothing Else Matters transcends its subject, for as we watch Jordan descend, we also somehow see ourselves."

Criticism

In his review of When Nothing Else Matters, English journalist Simon Barnes of The Times wrote "A better book, a perceptive writer, might have noticed that there was something heroic in all this: but Leahy is too deeply committed to his premise that everything Jordan does is, by definition, shameful."

Personal

Leahy resides with his wife and son in a suburb of Washington D.C.

Bibliography

• Leahy, Michael. (1988a) Hard Lessons, Boston. Little, Brown and Company.
• Leahy, Michael. (2004a) When Nothing Else Matters, New York. Simon & Schuster.

Cramer, Richard (editor). (2004a) The Best American Sports Writing, New York. Houghton Mifflin Company.