‘We do this in remembrance’: Wright Thompson’s search for home

Don’t tell Wright Thompson he’s the last of a dying breed.

The ESPN storyteller from Mississippi is widely considered the preeminent sportswriter in America. And he’s not ready to declare sports journalism — or the magazine-style features he built his career upon — as a lost art or extinct practice.

“There is something about the written word that will endure,” Thompson told Awful Announcing in a phone interview. “It has endured for 2,000 years. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. The person who comes along and replaces me and the group of people who do this will be writing these stories.”

The machinery behind those stories has never been in greater flux, bringing both challenges and opportunities.

“However naive and earnest it may sound, the sports longform magazine story, what Sports Illustrated used to call a bonus piece, is a minor yet to me important American art form. And it’s uniquely American. They don’t have this tradition in other places. One of the real challenges for me when I’m trying to write profiles of international athletes is there isn’t some sort of DNA-level understanding of what this is. This is a very American thing,” Thompson said.

But the tradition of longform storytelling in sports has run head-on with another: capitalism and profit. Sports journalism has increasingly had to fight for space in the greater media ecosystem with the fiery takes of debate culture and the insatiable desire for news that insiders feed on an hourly basis. It’s difficult to turn an 8,000-word story into a tweet that can be viewed a million times. It’s even more difficult to monetize it. Sports Illustrated itself just went through a painful round of layoffs after a $200 million deal with an AI sports video platform went wrong.

It’s also losing ground in a world where the subjects are telling their own stories, and access comes at a price. Messages are more controlled and sanitized than ever before.

Wright Thompson does not make deals for access.

When he wrote about Michael Jordan turning 50 years old in 2013 and the existential dilemma of how the GOAT deals with getting old, Jordan’s camp wanted to see the story before it printed. Thompson refused.

“I was nervous as shit, but that’s the job,” Thompson reflected. “Instinctively, readers and viewers understand when they are being sold concert t-shirts, not journalism. They instinctively understand when something is merch.”

Family Ties

Wright Thompson cites the mantra of legendary Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith. A profile is figuring out the central complication of somebody’s life and how they try to solve it.

What is that central complication for the man who has made writing profiles about figures in sports and beyond into an art form?

“My central complication in a maximalist way is the same as everybody else’s,” Thompson said. “I’ve got lots of daddy issues. It’s pretty clear the things that I’m drawn to. One of the things I try to figure out is why. I write about people’s relationship with their kids a lot more now that I have kids. These things are forever evolving.”

One of the defining pieces of Wright Thompson’s career came shortly after he moved to ESPN. In 2007, he wrote a powerful essay about attending The Masters after his father’s death, opening up about his longing to take his dad to the golf tournament he loved to watch so dearly, but missing out on the opportunity to do so. “Holy Ground” is quintessential Thompson in that it connects a sporting event to universal emotions of love, family, and loss.

This year, he took his oldest daughter, 8-year-old Wallace, to The Masters for the first time. Wallace has also been to four Dead & Company shows and backstage with Bruce Springsteen. In her father’s words, “she can hang.”

She just started playing golf this year. He glowed about her experience at Augusta National, from eating donuts at the media center to sharing a table with Pat McAfee at an event Thompson held with Julian Van Winkle, proprietor of the Kentucky bourbon dynasty.

When ESPN colleague Scott Van Pelt saw Thompson with his daughter at Augusta, he understood the weight of the moment and cried. As she sat off-set with David Duval, the two dear friends had to compose themselves before appearing on live television in front of millions of people.

“I got a very complicated relationship, like a lot of people, with the history of the club. But the tournament itself is deeply important to me. I was definitely emotional, and she definitely got it, which was also interesting. She liked being treated like a grown-up,” Thompson shared. “We set our chairs up by Amen Corner, and we sat next to each other. It was time to go, and she wanted to go back out on the course and see Rory McIlroy. It was honestly one of the best days I’ve had in a really, really, really long time.”

The master as student

“My name is Wright Thompson, and I suck at golf. And yet, I love it.”

That is how the ESPN scribe introduces his newest venture, a series called Where it Lies, exploring four different public courses that represent the backbone of golf.

How can you love something that you admittedly suck at? 

“Golf is something that I shared with my father and that I share with my daughter, and that sharing to me is way more important than what I shoot,” Thompson said.

The series visits Van Cortlandt Park Golf Course in New York, Rancho Park Golf Course in Los Angeles, The Patch in Augusta, and Kahuku Golf Course in Kahuku, Hawaii. The first two episodes are available on the ESPN app. Episode three debuts on the app on June 22 and will also air on ESPN2.

From the longtime club pros to the hackers with their own nicknames and legends to the starter’s shack to the local food joint across the street that doubles as the unofficial 19th hole, this is where the stories are.

Even at this point in his career, Thompson is willing to try new things to tell stories, even if that means exploring new mediums that didn’t exist when his career began. As for his series, he hopes that these first four episodes are only the corner pieces of a much larger puzzle. ESPN has yet to commit to more episodes, but Thompson sees his pilgrimage into public golf as not a four-part arc but one that could last for 50 episodes, with so many blank canvases in communities and at courses around the country.

Our Mission Statement. “Where It Lies” with Wright Thompson on ESPN. @timothyhorgan pic.twitter.com/6St9Sfy9JW

— Where It Lies (@WhereItLiesTV) April 8, 2026

“I’ve never been happier or more excited to get up and go to work, and I’m trying to look at it as the glass is half-full and there’s all sorts of new toys to play with,” Thompson said. “I did one of those longform serialized podcasts because I wanted to know what it was like. And you know what? They’re fucking hard. They’re really hard. I’m most excited being a student. So the fact that the whole world is changing, I find incredibly exciting and energizing, and I find myself all the time now in situations where I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing and need help. And I love that.”

The series is symbolic of the greater struggle happening throughout the sports world. Golf has been torn apart by a civil war thanks to the Saudi Arabian government spending billions of dollars on a vanity project because they were confident the biggest stars of the game could be bought. But the one thing LIV Golf couldn’t buy was roots.

“People hated it. I’m not smart enough to unpack, but it felt like from the beginning, everyone hated it. The only people who didn’t know that everybody hated it were the people running it. It wasn’t about success for Greg Norman. It was about fuck you. Like my dad used to say, if you act for revenge, you’d better dig two graves. It was born out of bitterness and revenge, not out of soul and love. It was doomed before the first person hit the first shot. I’m a professional sportswriter and love golf, and I can’t tell you a single team name,” Thompson reflected.

But at these public courses and countless others like them around the country, he saw the game of golf healthier than ever. Not because of the massive amounts of private equity being invested at the top level, not because another signature event added another zero to a PGA Tour pro’s bank account, and not because they are maxing out their club speeds.

“What I’m seeing from the places we’re featuring is that golf played by regular citizens, men, women, girls, and boys, grandparents, and 8-year-old girls from Oxford, Mississippi, the health of that game has never been more vibrant,” Thompson said.

It’s that generational bond that keeps Thompson coming back to golf and still believing in the power of telling stories in and around sports. His new series is about the community and the families that it brings together across generations, incomes, occupations, and ethnicities – the divisions that exist everywhere else in today’s world.

“It’s the universality of it. It’s that these episodes are not about golf; they’re about community. And we hope in telling enough of them we form a tapestry that somewhere in that tapestry you see yourself and the people who matter to you in your life. That’s the big macro goal. We’re not doing one-offs. There is a worldview and a philosophy on display in the creation of this show.”

Thompson sees a similar DNA between Where it Lies and his SEC Network show TrueSouth on Southern food and culture in that sports are merely a lens through which a connection to something greater can be cultivated.

“I want both of these shows, and especially the golf show, to be at their core radical acts of empathy. That’s what we’re after. The golf stuff is secondary to the idea we are finding communities of people who are finding ways to connect with their fellow human beings in a moment when we are told that is becoming more and more impossible,” Thompson said.

The empathy that defines Thompson’s work is rooted in the belief that sports are rarely just about the games themselves. They are the setting where families, communities, and generations find connection with one another.

“Sports are full of ghosts, and it’s one of the reasons why they matter. I’ve been watching the reaction to the Knicks or the Cubs ten years ago. That’s what that’s about. It’s the lines from the Episcopal liturgy that I love, ‘we do this in remembrance of you.’ To me, that is at the heart of why we love sports. It’s why any of this shit matters,” Thompson said.

“The reason sportswriting isn’t dead and the reason sportswriting won’t die is that writing about sports is really writing about your family. It’s writing about yourself. It’s writing about your community. It’s writing about your hopes and dreams. It’s writing about your inheritance. Those things will always matter, no matter how the culture zig-zags. Those things will always represent our better angels. Sports can be very divisive, but the best of us lives at its soul.”

Untold Stories

But perhaps the best story of Wright Thompson’s career is the one that he didn’t tell.

While sharing the experience at The Masters with his daughter for the first time this past April would have made for an incredible piece of sportswriting that would have lived well beyond its first publication, Wright Thompson didn’t write a story about it.

“I certainly thought about it, and then decided not everything needs to be copy,” Thompson said. “It was a wonderful, wonderful moment in my life, and that’s what it felt like it should be.”

“You write when you feel compelled to write. I didn’t want to be taking notes or anything. I felt like I did write about her first trip to the Masters, just in utero and in imagination at the end of that story about my dad.”

Much like the famous photo of Phil Knight looking confidently at LeBron James breaking the NBA scoring record in a sea of smartphone cameras, Thompson was content to hold the moment with his daughter for his and her memory bank and not for the sake of content for others.

“I have a lot of wonderful memories of my dad, but I certainly feel like I have, in many ways, through writing stories, processed all of that. I don’t carry it around like I used to. And I don’t know whether that’s the passage of time; I don’t know why that is. But I certainly feel like I have a lot less than I used to. But it’s interesting. I don’t think anybody who writes these stories thinks about a legacy of them. You try to do each of them the best you can. They all exist for me as one-act plays.”

Yes, part of it was that the Augusta trip was sandwiched between his reporting on Steve Kerr amid the decision about whether he would return to the Golden State Warriors. He took a red-eye flight into Memphis after spending time with Kerr in San Francisco, drove to Oxford to pick up his daughter from school, then drove straight to Georgia before flying back to California on Monday.

But perhaps it’s also the truest testament to the power of sports, community, and connection that one of the world’s greatest sportswriters experienced something so meaningful that he chose to keep it as a treasure for himself. The remembrance of that day will live as father and daughter, not writer and subject. For someone who has written so much about his father and his family, it is also a testament to how we all evolve.

As he reflected on that decision, Thompson revealed the tension that lives inside even the most accomplished writers and artists — the suspicion that no matter how much heart and soul is poured into the work, none of it may ultimately last.

“Nobody’s going to remember any of these things, you know what I mean? Nobody’s going to remember any of this stuff. So you do every one of them as best as you can. You try to prioritize what’s actually important, which is maybe why I didn’t write about the Masters with this most recent trip,” he shared.

Wright Thompson will be back at Augusta, Georgia, next year. He will walk the holy ground once more as his story, and the ones he chooses to tell, continue to unfold.

“In some ways, every piece of art ever made is about searching for home.”