Madison, WI
April 1, 2017

Speaker

Steve Wilstein

Author, Sportswriter and Photographer

Steve Wilstein, class of ’70, is an author, sportswriter and photographer. As a former columnist for The Associated Press, he launched coverage of the “Steroid Era” in sports with his reports on Ben Johnson at the 1988 Olympics and his discovery of Mark McGwire’s “andro” use during his record-setting 70-home run season in 1998. Wilstein was featured in Ken Burns’ documentary “The Tenth Inning” and has been nominated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Wilstein’s photographs of Muhammad Ali were part of a touring exhibition of the former heavyweight champion, along with images by Gordon Parks and Anne Leibovitz. His photographs of the Boston Red Sox have been exhibited by the Griffin Museum gallery and Panopticon Gallery in Boston. Wilstein also served as a foreign correspondent, covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Indira Gandhi’s return to prime minister of India.

He covered the outbreak of AIDS in San Francisco and the boom years of Silicon Valley in the 1980s. He covered 14 Olympics, as well as Super Bowls, World Series, Final Fours, and the Grand Slams of tennis and golf. Wilstein interviewed and profiled all the major sports stars over the past five decades and many from earlier eras, going back to the 1920s.

He has interviewed presidents and prime ministers, artists, inventors and generals, killers and scoundrels: the famous, infamous and anonymous newsmakers of our times. Wilstein was born in New York and now lives in Boston.