Speakers
Taylor Branch
Taylor Branch will deliver the plenary address. Branch is the author of the book The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA. Most recently, his article in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly entitled, The Shame of College Sports, sent shockwaves through the college sports world. Frank DeFord described the piece as “the most important article ever written on college sports.”
Branch may be best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years, a trilogy whose first book won a Pulitzer prize, and for which the series earned critical and popular success.
His memoir of President Bill Clinton, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, reveals a president up close and unguarded. The memoir is far more personal than Branch's previous books and gathers a sitting president's comprehensive oral history.
Aside from writing, Taylor Branch speaks before a variety of audiences - colleges, high schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, political and professional groups, and now, the Fifth Summit on Communication and Sport at Bradley University.
Dave Kindred
Dave Kindred (Sportswriter and author) has reported and written for newspapers and magazines for forty-five years. He has been a Washington correspondent, a sports columnist, and a general-interest columnist.
Kindred's work as a sportswriter has taken him around the world. He has covered seven Olympic Games, 39 Super Bowls, 40 World Series, 43 Kentucky Derbys, and 17 Muhammad Ali championship fights.
He once sat with Charlize Theron under a full moon, talking golf. He has had breakfast with Katarina Witt, lunch with Tiger Woods, and dinner with Stan Musial. He has heard Bobby Knight speak his name in irritation, and he has carried Michael Jordan's shoes. Most recently he was chosen as the 2012 winner of The Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism, an honor shared with recipients like Bob Costas, Frank DeFord, Jim McKay, and Mitch Albom.
The most recent of his nine books, Morning Miracle, was published in 2010 and is a study of the rise and decline of The Washington Post. A native of Atlanta, Illinois, and a graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University, Kindred became a sportswriter at seventeen. He is the 1991 winner of sports writing’s highest honor, the Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement. He wants to win it twice.
Charley Steiner
Charley Steiner began his broadcasting career in 1969 for WIRL radio in Peoria, Illinois, where he also graduated, in 1971, from Bradley University. Along the way, he has called games for the New York Jets from 1986 to 1987, the USFL's New Jersey Generals from 1983 to 1985, was a staple for boxing, baseball, and college football for years at ESPN, and became a regular anchor on SportsCenter. After leaving ESPN, he was the announcer for the Yankees from 2002 to 2004, where he was paired with John Sterling. He has won a CableACE award for a program about Muhammad Ali and a Clarion award for his coverage of the Mike Tyson rape trial.
A lifelong Dodgers fan since they were in Brooklyn, in November of 2004 Charley came back to the future when he became one of the announcers for the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he works with Rick Monday calling innings 3-9 of games that are televised. Vin Scully calls the first two innings in a simulcast while Steiner calls the television play-by-play on games that Scully doesn't work (East of the Rockies).
For two years he's also done Baseball Beat with Charley Steiner on XM Satellite radio (Broadcast on MLB Homeplate - XM 175, 1pm-3pm EST). Charley has been able to conduct interviews with an incredible array of guests that have opened up where they might not otherwise have done so, given Charley¹s personality and reputation in the business as being a stand-up guy. Steiner is a four time Emmy-Award winner.
Molly Knight
Molly Knight was born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, a proud product of the public school system. She initially wanted to be a doctor and graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Human Biology and a minor in Psychology. She changed her mind her senior year and decided to become a writer instead.
With no experience whatsoever, she moved to New York and became a bartender and taught herself how to write in coffee shops in the East Village. After two years behind the bar she got her first assignment for ESPN the Magazine in 2006 - a piece on Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning.
Knight has been with ESPN ever since, writing for the Magazine and ESPN.com. In 2009 she got her big break covering the controversy surrounding the ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers. After spending much of the last three years covering that court case she moved back to LA full-time last year with her dachshund mix, Pirate.
