Art Thiel: “It was a Grand Experiment in Mayhem.”

Press Box Access: A Sports History Podcast

You can almost hear a crackling campfire as Art Thiel shares stories from his nearly 50 years of writing about sports. Art takes us deep into his home base of Seattle, off to foreign lands for the Olympics, and into a trashed casino after Mike Tyson chomped Evander Holyfield’s ear. Hear about a young Bill Walton, the volatile SuperSonics of George Karl, and how the 1995 Mariners saved baseball in Seattle. Art recalls his years of covering Ken Griffey Jr. and Lou Piniella with humor and insight. We learn about his unique vantage point from an NBA media seat created by a team owner who wanted him arrested. Oh, and there’s a story about beer, bread, and kangaroos. Seriously.

Thiel knows all the rings in the sports tree of the Pacific Northwest, where he has been a professional journalist since 1975, including 29 years as columnist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He covered numerous Olympics, Super Bowls, and World Series after joining the P-I in 1980 and serving as the Post-Intelligencer’s sports columnist from ’87 until the print edition died in 2009. Art continued writing for the paper’s website until 2010, when he left to become co-founder, president and columnist at Sportspress Northwest. He spent 12 years writing for SportsPressNW.com – which focused on Seattle’s pro teams and University of Washington sports – until that website stopped publishing in 2022. Art now writes for PostAlley.org, a Seattle-centric website.

Art’s career began at the Bellevue (Wash.) Journal-American after he graduated in 1975 with a communications degree at Pacific Lutheran University, where he played basketball. He then moved to The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington, where he grew up, before becoming a mainstay at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1980.

Thiel was also a well-known radio sports commentator on the Seattle NPR affiliate KPLU-FM, on ESPN 710 Seattle, and on KNKX. He wrote the definitive book about the Seattle Mariners, “Out of Left Field,” which became a regional bestseller. Art is also co-author of “Russel Wilson: Standing Tall” and co-author of “The Great Book of Seattle Sports Lists.”

You can follow him on X: @Art_Thiel

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