John Powers (journalist)

John Leonard Powers (born November 6, 1948) is a journalist and author who wrote for The Boston Globe for more than four decades in the Sports, Metro, Sunday, Magazine and Living departments and later became a freelance correspondent for the newspaper. Many sportswriters consider him the dean of Olympic journalists; he has covered every Olympic Games (summer and winter) since 1976[1], excepting the 1980 Moscow Games, when the U.S. boycott led the Russians to refuse to issue a visa. He may well have reported from more Olympics than any American sportswriter. Powers was part of a highly regarded sportswriting team at the Globe. “From the mid-1970s to the early '80s,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 2009, “the Globe contained arguably the greatest collection of reporting talent ever assembled in a sports section…”[2] Powers has written or co-authored 11 books.

Biography

Early life and education

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first child of a Boston policeman, Powers graduated in 1966 from Boston Latin School. He earned an A.B. cum laude from Harvard in 1970 and, while there, wrote for the sports section of The Harvard Crimson student newspaper. A member of Navy ROTC during college, Powers served as a U.S. Navy line officer from 1970 to 1972 aboard the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42), an aircraft carrier based in Mayport, Florida, and the Mediterranean.

Career

Besides covering the Olympics, Powers has reported from five men's and two women's soccer World Cups. He has filed stories from five continents. He has led the Globe’s coverage of the Boston Marathon and covered that event for nearly five decades.

Personal life

Powers married Elaine LePage in 1974. They have two sons, Jonathan and Evan, and three grandchildren. A Little League coach when his boys were young, Powers lived for many years in Wellesley, Massachusetts, until moving to Brewster, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He is a former Graduate Board president of the Fly Club at Harvard.

Honors and awards

Powers shared the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a special issue of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine titled “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age.” [3][4]

In 2011,Powers received the Boston Athletic Association’s Will Cloney Award, presented to an individual who has promoted the sport of running, especially locally.[5]

Powers was a Poynter Fellow at Yale UNiversity.

Bibliography

The Short Season: A Boston Celtics Diary, 1977-78. HarperCollins, 1979. 978-0060134518

Yankees: An Illustrated History (with George Sullivan). Prentice Hall, 1982. ISBN 978-0139718120

One Goal: A Chronicle of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team (with Arthur C. Kaminsky). HarperCollins, 1984. ISBN 978-0060152000

Mary Lou: Creating an Olympic Champion (with Mary Lou Retton). McGraw-Hill, 1985. ISBN 978-0440155089 [6]

Seasons to Remember: The Way It Was in American Sports, 1945-60 (with Curt Gowdy). HarperCollins, 1993. ISBN 978-0060182281

The Boston Handbook (with illustrator Peter Wallace). On Cape Publications, 1999. ISBN 978-0975850275

The Boston Dictionary (with illustrator Peter Wallace). On Cape Publications, 2004. ISBN 978-0971954700

Fenway Park: A Salute to the Coolest, Cruelest, Longest-Running Major League Baseball Stadium in America (with Ron Driscoll). Running Press Adult, 2012. ISBN 978-0762442041

The Third H Book of Harvard Athletics (with John Veneziano). Harvard Varsity Club, 2014.

The Head of the Charles Regatta: First 50 Head of the Charles Regatta, 2015. ISBN 978-0692458570 [7]

Fridays with Bill: Inside the Football Mind of Bill Belichick Thorndike Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1629376295

References

1. “The Olympics, via Powers,” Harvard Magazine. July 30, 2012.

2. Scott Tinley, “Glory days of The Boston Globe: the greatest sports staff ever,” Sports Illustrated, June 3, 2009.

3. “Sketches of Pulitzer Prize Winners; Public Service,” The New York Times, April 19, 1983.

4. http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/1983

5. Duncan Larkin, “Jock Semple and Will Cloney Award Winners Named,” Competitor Running, December 9, 2011.

6. Grace Lichtenstein, “Mary Lou Retton: A Perfect Ten,” Washington Post, October 6, 1985.

7. Oli Rosenbladt, “Sportswriter John Powers of the Boston Globe,” Row 2k, November 4, 2015.