Gorant, Jim 1967-

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Gorant, Jim 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born February 23, 1967. Education: Villanova University, B.A.; New York University, M.A.

CAREER:

Sports Illustrated, New York, NY, editor, beginning 2004, currently senior editor. Also worked for Sports Illustrated Golf Plus, Men's Health, GQ, Outside, Sports Afield Travel & Leisure Golf, and others.

WRITINGS:

(With Boris Kuzmic) Fit for Golf: A Personalized Conditioning Routine to Help You Improve Your Score, Hit the Ball Farther, and Enjoy the Game More, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2004.

Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do before They Die, Houghton Mifflin Company (Boston, MA), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Men's Journal, Travel & Leisure, GQ, and Men's Health. Also author of the blog Fanatic: 10 Things All Sports Fans Should Do B4 They Die.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sportswriter Jim Gorant has been part of the Sports Illustrated editorial team since 2004. His specialty is golf; in addition to writing for Sports Illustrated Golf Plus and Travel & Leisure Golf, he has composed (with golf pro Boris Kuzmic) the guide Fit for Golf: A Personalized Conditioning Routine to Help You Improve Your Score, Hit the Ball Farther, and Enjoy the Game More. He believes, he stated on his author blog, that this path to a sportswriting career allowed him to reach an important stage in his professional development with his basic sports-fan instincts intact. "In 2004," he wrote in his blog, "I realized there were a lot of big-time, elemental sports events I'd never been to. So I spent one year traveling to the ten greatest sports events, or at least the ten that topped my list and wrote a book about the experience." The result was Fanatic: Ten Things All Sports Fans Should Do before They Die.

Fanatic is an examination of the experience of attending sporting events. Gorant, wrote a contributor on the Cynical Bastard Web site, "starts [the book] with the Super Bowl in January of 2005 in Jacksonville, Florida and ends it with opening day for the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park in Boston in April of 2006. In between he attends some of the biggest sporting events anywhere including the NCAA Men's Final Four, Wimbledon and the Kentucky Derby among others." What Fanatic is examining just as much as the events themselves, however, is the culture of the attendees at the events—the fans. These included rabid NASCAR fans (including one whose devotion to auto racing caused a delay in the launching of the space shuttle), and "Ignatius ‘Kelly’ Giglio," wrote Vince Darcangelo in the Rocky Mountain News, "the longest-tenured Boston Red Sox season ticket-holder who held his seats from 1935 until his death in 2005, but stuck around long enough to see his hard-luck team finally win the big one." At the same time, noted a reviewer on the Joy of Sox Web site, Fanatic "is also part-memoir, as Gorant looks back, exploring how his own relationship to sports has changed as he has gotten older, from an obsessive who sulked all night after a loss to someone who still watches and cheers, but at an emotional distance." In Fanatic, wrote a contributor to the BookPage Web site, Gorant has "combined an engaging travelogue with a study of human nature and a tale of internal exploration."