Renowned Mississippi sports writer Rick Cleveland will begin an exclusive weekly column for Mississippi Today on June 3.
Cleveland, a Hattiesburg native, is the most decorated sports journalist in Mississippi history and is celebrating his 50th year as a sports writer, sports editor, columnist and author.
“Sports is such a huge and colorful part of the yarn so richly woven into Mississippi’s social fabric,” Cleveland said. “I am excited about the idea and potential of Mississippi Today and I can’t wait to be a part of it.”
Mississippi Today Co-editor Dennis Moore observed: “Whenever people talk about sports here, you often hear the question, ‘Did you read what Rick Cleveland said about that?’ Now we’re proud for Mississippi Today to be part of that conversation.”
The column will run every Friday afternoon at MississippiToday.org.
Cleveland became executive director of the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in 2012 after 33 years with The Clarion-Ledger and more than 40 years as a full-time sports writer. Now the Hall of Fame’s Historian, Rick writes for the museum’s website and serves up a syndicated weekly column available to newspapers across Mississippi.
In 2011, Cleveland became the first sports writer honored with the prestigious Richard Wright Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Excellence. Previous winners include such authors as Eudora Welty, Richard Ford and Willie Morris.
Cleveland, the author of four books, also received the Distinguished Mississippian Award from the Mississippi Press Association’s Education Foundation in 2000. His biography of baseball great Boo Ferriss is in its third printing. His most recent book, Mississippi’s Greatest Athletes (Nautilus 2014), is in its second printing.
“Rick Cleveland understands sports and Mississippi and writes about both with nuance and passion that is unmatched,” said Mississippi Today Co-editor Fred Anklam Jr. “We are excited to bring Rick’s award-winning journalism directly to our readers on a regular basis.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.