Dave Kindred, 2018 Winner

Judges: Chloe Cooper Jones, Joe Nocera, Sally Jenkins

From the judges’ citation: “For more than half a century Dave Kindred has written about sports with a primacy of the physical senses and a plain, spare language that make his pieces into immediate personal experiences. A curve at a race track becomes an exercise in rising dread. The thrum of a stock car engine vibrates in the chest. A jockey’s whip strikes the face of a great racehorse, and the followers of his words feel the foul. In seven books, scores of magazine pieces, and newspaper columns from the Louisville Courier-Journal to the Washington Post, Kindred has explored with equal curiosity and insight the largest championships across the globe, and a girls basketball team in small high school gym in Normal, Illinois. Muhammad Ali appears to light the Olympic Torch “as if materializing before the eyes of the world.” At Daytona, “they dress up by tucking in their T-shirts.” A baseball season “is a novel written in the dirt. There is no rushing to the end.” Kindred’s work is like such a novel, a page-turning experience the reader is reluctant to ever reach the end of.”