On Monday, Nov. 7, Steve Fainaru, Pulitzer Prize winner and ESPN investigative journalist, sat down with students over dinner to discuss his career in journalism and the interface between sports and politics.
“Sports are such a big part of our world, our culture and the way we see ourselves,” Fainaru said at the event, titled “What Sports Tell Us About the World.”
Fainaru’s career in journalism began with the Boston Red Sox for the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, and later the Boston Globe.
“My whole world was Major League Baseball,” he said of this time.
Fainaru’s coverage of the Boston Red Sox included not only the team, but the fans as well. His 1991 front page article on the Boston Globe, which focused on the relationship between the Red Sox and Boston’s black community, documented the team’s historic racism and “caused a shitstorm in Boston.”
Fainaru eventually left baseball to return to school and earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University in 1992. “[Studying] was glamorous at first, but it lost its allure,” he said.
Fainaru was the bureau chief of Mexico City from 1995 to 1998, doing Latin American affairs for the Boston Globe. His time in Latin America changed the way he covered sports. Fainaru began following Cuban pitcher Orlando Hernández, nicknamed “El Duque”. In 2001, Fainaru published his first book, “The Duke of Havana: Baseball, Cuba and the Search for the American Dream” on Hernández. At the time, Hernández was a former American League MVP for the New York Yankees.
In 2012, Fainaru wrote “League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth” with his brother, fellow ESPN reporter Mark Fainaru-Wada, who researched brain injuries in NFL players. The book was later adapted into a documentary film for PBS Frontline.
During the question-and-answer portion of the dinner, Princeton students asked Fainaru about the nature of sports as both a getaway for fans and a place of political activism.
“People say you have to ‘play sports’, for example with [Colin] Kaepernick – people said ‘just play football,’ he said. However, for Fainaru it is vital to ‘point out inconvenient truths’ because it ‘feels insincere to ignore this stuff – it permeates the sport”. Fainaru also said he sees “sports being polarized in the same way as the country”.
“It’s hard to know where the world is going,” he said. “We’ll find out more tomorrow night [Election Night] and then in 2024.”
As the discussion drew to a close, he encouraged the students to accept that they may not have expertise in everything.
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“You’re generally a stranger to these areas of interest and that can go a long way.”
When asked about upcoming projects, Fainaru said he hopes to complete an investigation into sexual misconduct in Argentine football, but emphasized that he is focusing on teaching here at Princeton and his upcoming book project.
Fainaru is currently a guest lecturer at the Humanities Council in Princeton, where he teaches JRN 441: The McGraw Seminar in Writing – What Sports Tell Us about Our World. He described his experience at Princeton as “amazing” and said he “really enjoyed the campus and the culture.”
The event took place on Monday, November 7 in the Wilcox Dining Hall from 6:00 PM – 7:15 PM. and was hosted by Butler College.
Justus Wilhoit is a newsreader for the ‘Prince’.
Nandini Krishnan is a news contributor for the ‘Prince’.
Please send any correction requests to corrections@dailyprincetonian.com.
