Jeff Pearlman

American sportswriter

Jeff Pearlman (born 1972) is an American sportswriter. He has written nine books that have appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list: four about football, three on baseball and two about basketball. He authored the 1999 John Rocker interview in Sports Illustrated.

Pearlman was born and raised in Mahopac, New York. He got his start in journalism in 1989, when he interned at a weekly newspaper in Cross River, titled The Patent Trader. After graduating from the University of Delaware, he was hired as a food and fashion writer by The Tennessean in Nashville. In 1996, Pearlman was hired by Sports Illustrated, where he spent nearly seven years as a baseball writer. In 2002, Pearlman left Sports Illustrated and spent the next two years at Newsday, but left to focus on writing books. He also keeps a personal online blog, where he posts a weekly Q&A series, The Quaz, with athletes, politicians, actors, singers and many random people. He has also used the site to write about such intimate issues as seeing a rival book get publicity in Sports Illustrated, where he worked, or finding blood in his feces after using the toilet. He was a frequent contributor to ESPN. com's Page 2, then as a columnist for SI. com. No stranger to controversy, Pearlman used his own website as a forum to call out the Christian missionary goals of Tim Tebow's father as "pretty evil." In the fall of 2007, Pearlman wrote several controversial articles on Page 2 regarding the lack of a rivalry between the University of Delaware's and Delaware State University's football teams. UD and DSU finally played a football game on November 23, 2007, at part of the NCAA Division I FCS playoffs. Delaware won the game with a score of 44–7. Pearlman was advisor to the student newspaper at Manhattanville College from 2011 to 2012, but his contract was not renewed because, according to Pearlman, the college was more concerned about "image control" than about producing "a quality student newspaper."