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Franz Lidz
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Franz Lidz
Franz Lidz (born September 24, 1951) is an American writer, journalist and former pro basketball executive.
A New York Times archaeology, science, and film essayist who originated the archaeological column "Lost and Found", Lidz is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer, Smithsonian columnist, and onetime vice president for the Detroit Pistons. His childhood memoir Unstrung Heroes was adapted into a Hollywood film of the same title in 1995.
Lidz was born in Manhattan, to Sidney, a Jewish electronics engineer who designed the first transistorized portable tape recorder (the Steelman Transitape), and Selma, a homemaker. His father gave him early exposure to authors like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco.
At age nine, still named Stephen before later legally taking Franz as his first name, he moved to the Philadelphia suburbs. Lidz attended high school in Cheltenham and college at Antioch College, where he was a theater major.
Lidz was a novice reporter at the weekly Sanford Star, where he wrote a column and covered police and fire beats. He left Maine to become a crime reporter and write a column called "Insect Jazz" for an alternative newspaper in Baltimore. He later became an editor of Johns Hopkins University Magazine.
In 1980, he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, even though he had never read the magazine and had covered only one sporting event in his life – a pigeon race in Shapleigh, Maine. Lidz remained on the writing staff for 27 years. In 2007 he jumped to the short-lived business monthly Conde Nast Portfolio, and then WSJ. magazine before landing at Smithsonian in 2012. His first feature story in The New York Times, on making the second descent of the Zambezi River, appeared on January 30, 1983.
Among his most controversial features are essays on reappraising the dodo; reconsidering Neanderthals; Don King's hair; the effects of climate change on glacial archaeology; the Pacific Northwest barred owl cull; Hannibal; the 2002 Paris-to-Dakar Rally; George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees' line of succession; the hijinks of onetime Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling; and a S.I. cover story with NBA player Jason Collins in which Collins became the first active male in one of the four major North American team sports to announce he was gay.
Unstrung Heroes is about Lidz's childhood, with his mother, father and his dad's four older brothers. He had previously written about two of the uncles in Sports Illustrated.
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Franz Lidz
Franz Lidz (born September 24, 1951) is an American writer, journalist and former pro basketball executive.
A New York Times archaeology, science, and film essayist who originated the archaeological column "Lost and Found", Lidz is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer, Smithsonian columnist, and onetime vice president for the Detroit Pistons. His childhood memoir Unstrung Heroes was adapted into a Hollywood film of the same title in 1995.
Lidz was born in Manhattan, to Sidney, a Jewish electronics engineer who designed the first transistorized portable tape recorder (the Steelman Transitape), and Selma, a homemaker. His father gave him early exposure to authors like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco.
At age nine, still named Stephen before later legally taking Franz as his first name, he moved to the Philadelphia suburbs. Lidz attended high school in Cheltenham and college at Antioch College, where he was a theater major.
Lidz was a novice reporter at the weekly Sanford Star, where he wrote a column and covered police and fire beats. He left Maine to become a crime reporter and write a column called "Insect Jazz" for an alternative newspaper in Baltimore. He later became an editor of Johns Hopkins University Magazine.
In 1980, he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, even though he had never read the magazine and had covered only one sporting event in his life – a pigeon race in Shapleigh, Maine. Lidz remained on the writing staff for 27 years. In 2007 he jumped to the short-lived business monthly Conde Nast Portfolio, and then WSJ. magazine before landing at Smithsonian in 2012. His first feature story in The New York Times, on making the second descent of the Zambezi River, appeared on January 30, 1983.
Among his most controversial features are essays on reappraising the dodo; reconsidering Neanderthals; Don King's hair; the effects of climate change on glacial archaeology; the Pacific Northwest barred owl cull; Hannibal; the 2002 Paris-to-Dakar Rally; George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees' line of succession; the hijinks of onetime Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling; and a S.I. cover story with NBA player Jason Collins in which Collins became the first active male in one of the four major North American team sports to announce he was gay.
Unstrung Heroes is about Lidz's childhood, with his mother, father and his dad's four older brothers. He had previously written about two of the uncles in Sports Illustrated.
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