Murray park: can heaven still be a playground?

An 8-part series recounting a summer spent in the deadly Chicago South Side neighborhood and park where NBA star Derrick Rose grew up, where the odds are long for any boy to make it out.

First Place, 2011 Illinois AP Editors’ Assoc. Editorial Excellence Award First Place, 2011 Peter Lisagor Award for Sports Writing.

A season under the gun

A 5-part series with postscript, following the Chicago Orr High School boys basketball team as it attempts to achieve greatness despite the dangers around it.

Winner Society of 2017 Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Sports Column Writing First Place, 2018 Society for Features Journalism Excellence-in-Features Award First Place, 2017 Peter Lisagor Award for Sports Columns First Place, 2018 National Assoc. of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award.

Films Encore: Rick Telander’s “Like a Rose”

In the summer of 1971, Rick Telander was cut from the Kansas City Chiefs’ training camp.  It was football’s way of writing him a “Dear John letter.”  Forty years later the veteran sportswriter wrote back.

Recently, NFL Films Presents looked back at Telander’s football career.  Narrated by Telander and visually navigated through photographs and newspaper clippings, the feature “Like a Rose”, produced by Keith Cossrow, is a compelling stroll through one man’s sweet and thorny gridiron memory garden.