Keown, Tim

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Office—ESPN the Magazine, 19 East 34th St., New York, NY 10016. Agent—The Literary Group International, 270 Lafayette St., Ste. 1505, New York, NY 10012. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, sports reporter; ESPN magazine, New York, NY, senior writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Associate Press Sports Editors awards for sports reporting.

WRITINGS:

Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1994.

(With Dennis Rodman) Bad as I Wanna Be, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Billy Waugh) Hunting the Jackal: A CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies, Morrow (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: A senior writer for ESPN magazine, Tim Keown is the author of the nonfiction work Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City, as well as coauthor of the memoirs Bad As I Wanna Be and Hunting the Jackal: A CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies. In Skyline Keown follows the 1992–93 season of the boys' basketball team at Skyline High School in Oakland, California. The writer attended almost every practice and game at Skyline, a predominately black, inner-city school. Keown's focus is on the team's rookie coach, Shawn Donlea, a young, white suburbanite who struggles to teach his disciplined system to his players. During the season, "the team and its coach battled their way to a compromise that allowed for some measure of success," observed Steve Gietscher in the Sporting News, and, according to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, Keown "finds hope for the players as many of them go on to further their education." In the words of Booklist contributor Wes Lukowsky, "this tough-minded yet empathetic book is equal parts basketball and sociology."

Bad as I Wanna Be recounts the exploits of former National Basketball Association star Dennis Rodman, a flamboyant, controversial power forward who won five world championships with the Detroit Pistons and the Chicago Bulls. In the work, Rodman discusses a variety of topics, including his views on race, his development as a basketball player, and his romantic relationship with singer Madonna. Reviewing Bad as I Wanna Be in People, Alex Tresniowski stated that, "while much of Rodman's rebelliousness seems like an act, he also comes across here as a fiercely proud misfit who simultaneously wants to shock the world and be embraced by it." "We may tire of his repetitious rants, we may reject his wild nonconformity, but finally, only the most inflexible of readers will fail to admire Rodman's unabashed honesty and irrepressible energy," noted Booklist critic Bill Ott.

In Hunting the Jackal, Keown and coauthor Billy Waugh recall several of Waugh's combat and intelligence-gathering missions in Vietnam, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Though Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor noted that Waugh "expresses the warrior ethic that has motivated him," he added that the soldier "is not personally revealing beyond exhibiting mission-oriented drive in dispatching the enemy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 15, 1994, Wes Lukowsky, review of Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City, p. 1319; May 15, 1996, Bill Ott, review of Bad as I Wanna Be, p. 1546; July, 2004, Gilbert Taylor, review of Hunting the Jackal: A CIA Ground Soldier's Fifty-Year Career Hunting America's Enemies, p. 1806.

People, May 27, 1996, Alex Tresniowski, review of Bad as I Wanna Be, p. 34.

Publishers Weekly, March 28, 1994, review of Skyline, p. 78.

San Francisco Chronicle, February 27, 1997, "Sporting Green Wins Three Awards in AP Contest," p. A2; April 2, 1997, "Chronicle Writers Honored by Sports Editors," p. A2.

Sporting News, May 9, 1994, Steve Gietschier, review of Skyline, p. 8; May 20, 1996, Steve Gietschier, review of Bad as I Wanna Be, p. 8.