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Wright Thompson
Wright Thompson
Born	September 9, 1976 (age 48); Clarksdale, Mississippi, United States
Occupation	journalist
Alma mater	University of Missouri
Subject	sports, society

Wright Thompson (born September 9, 1976) is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He formerly worked at The Kansas City Star and Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Thompson's topics have covered a wide range of sports issues.

Early life and education

Thompson is a native of Clarksdale in northern Mississippi, the son of Mary Thompson. His late father, Walter Wright Thompson, an attorney, played a pivotal role in Clarksdale's emergence as a tourist destination based on blues music. The senior Thompson was an ardent Democrat who was the Mississippi finance chairman for the 1984 John Glenn presidential campaign. He later supported Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton in their campaigns against George Herbert Walker Bush. Thompson is a 1996 graduate of Lee Academy, where his peers voted him Most Likely to Succeed and Student Body President.

Career

Thompson started his sportswriting career while a student at the University of Missouri in Columbia, having covered Missouri sports and writing as a columnist for the School of Journalism's Columbia Missourian.

Between his junior and senior years, he interned at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and later was the LSU beat writer there. He later moved to the Kansas City Star, where he covered a wide variety of sports events including Super Bowls, Final Fours, The Masters, and The Kentucky Derby.

In 2006, he assumed full-time writing duties at ESPN.com.

In 2008, after watching the University of Alabama narrowly defeat Louisiana State University in a home game in Baton Rouge, Thompson described Tiger Stadium as "the best place in the world to watch a sporting event."^[1]

His 2010 article Ghosts of Mississippi inspired the 2012 ESPN 30 for 30 series documentary film The Ghosts of Ole Miss (which Thompson narrated),^[2] about the 1962 football team's perfect season and concurrent violence and rioting over integration of the segregated university by James Meredith.^[3] He also narrated the ESPN 30 for 30 film Roll Tide/War Eagle.

In 2024, Penguin Press published The Barn, Thompson's account of the 1955 abduction, torture, and lynching of the fourteen-year-old Black boy Emmett Till by white men near Drew, Mississippi.^[4]

Article on Dublin

His 2017 article on Conor McGregor and Dublin for ESPN was criticised by residents for bearing no resemblance to the actual city.^[5]^[6]^[7] Jennifer O'Connell wrote:

In the piece, McGregor’s childhood upbringing in the “projects” of Crumlin and Drimnagh suggests he was brought up in the Gaza Strip or 1920s Chicago, not a neighbourhood in which this writer lived for six happy and peaceful years, oblivious to the grenades whizzing by, or the fact that I should have been taking an armed escort whenever I had to cross the Liffey.
— Jennifer O'Connell, Conor McGregor, Crumlin and the Kinahans: an unrecognisable Dublin, The Irish Times^[7]

She also suggested that the author might have been duped by interviewees: "To be fair to Wright Thompson, you can’t help feeling that some of his interviewees might have seen him – and a Hollywood agent – coming."^[7]

Fintan O'Toole called Thompson's description of Dublin "ludicrous".^[8]

Rick O'Shea tweeted:

I grew up in both the ‘projects’ *ahem* of Crumlin and Drimnagh. This is lazy stereotyping bullshit of the highest order ...
— Rick O'Shea, in Tom Lutz, ESPN's portrait of a gang-infested Dublin attracts bemusement in Ireland, The Guardian^[6]