Charlie Pierce

Charles P. ("Charlie") Pierce (b. December 28, 1953, Worcester, Massachusetts) is a nationally known American sportswriter, author, and game show panelist.^[1]

He graduated from St. John's High School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts^[2] and from Marquette University with a journalism major in 1975.^[3]

Pierce's first job was as a forest ranger for the state of Massachusetts, where among other duties he retrieved disposable diapers from trees so that raccoons would not choke on them.^[4] He wrote for Worcester Magazine in the 1970s, where he covered the Blizzard of 1978.^[5] In the 1980s and '90, he was a staff reporter for the Boston Phoenix and, later, a sports columnist for the Boston Herald.^[3]

Pierce currently writes for Esquire, a position he has held since September 2011.^[6] He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe Sunday magazine, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, GQ, and the e-zine Slate as well as the Media Matters blog Altercation, hosted by historian/pundit Eric Alterman.

Pierce also makes appearances on radio as a regular contributor to NPR programs Only A Game and Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!. Recently Pierce has begun making weekly appearances on the Stephanie Miller Show. He also represented the Globe on several occasions on ESPN's Around the Horn. He also often co-hosts with Bob Ryan on NESN's Globe 10.0.

Publications

Pierce has written four books:^[4]

• Sports Guy (2000)
• Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story (2001)
• Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything (2006)
• Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (2009)

Quotes

• "The Democrats are a timorous collection of trimmers and hedgers, one more bad beat away from whimpering themselves into a gelatinous goo just liquid enough to ooze under the door of some lobbying shop. They couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if they drove up in a Brink's truck. They spent a flat year trying to get one vote out of Olympia Snowe...And the Republicans are simply insane. Poor old John McCain is being primaried by J.D. Hayworth, once the dumbest man in Congress, at the behest of what might be called the lunatic fringe, if it wasn't the very mainstream of the party now. The energy of the party is wholly directed from the ancient, dark heart of American conspiracy theories, where it is not directed at simply standing athwart anything this president wants to do."^[7]

Pierce is infamous for his 2003 Globe Magazine profile of Ted Kennedy in which he stated: “If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.” The passage was widely misinterpreted as laudatory of Kennedy; the full context makes clear that it was intended as irony. James Taranto, an online columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote, "Charles Pierce must really hate Ted Kennedy," and described the excerpt as a "paragraph of pure poison." In an e-mail interview with Dan Kennedy (not related to the senator) of the Boston Phoenix, Pierce confirmed that he considered his reference to Kopechne as being a harsh observation about Ted Kennedy. Pierce criticized several conservative commentators who had cited the passage as an example of liberal media bias and added, "My respect for Mr. Taranto grows by the hour." Nevertheless, the conservative Media Research Center made it its "Quote of the Year" in its 2004 DisHonors Awards, given to "the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2003."

In January 2010, Pierce ridiculed the notion that Republican Scott Brown could win the Massachusetts special Senate election in a column published in the Boston Globe Magazine and formulated as a letter to Brown, with Pierce stating, "Well, we're almost here, aren't we? The end of a long, arduous, four-month campaign for a Senate seat that you have approximately the same chance of filling as you did the pilot's chair of the Starship Enterprise" and "The notion that Massachusetts would elect a Republican to fill the seat left vacant by Edward Kennedy was the property of people who buy interesting mushrooms in interesting places. You might as well expect the House of Windsor to be succeeded on the British throne by the Kardashian sisters."^[8] Despite Pierce's certainty that he would lose, Brown went on to win the Senate seat.

References

1. ^ . Worcester Magazine. 2006-04-27. http://www.worcestermag.com/archives/2006/04-27-06/city_desk.html. 
2. ^ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-26/football-hold-the-stuffing
3. ^ ^{a b} "Charles P. Pierce". Charles Pierce. http://www.charlespierce.net/aboutPage. 
4. ^ ^{a b} "About the Panelists". National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/aboutpanelists.html. 
5. ^ Chet Williamson (2008-02-21). "30th Anniversary: Blizzard of '78". Worcester Magazine. http://www.worcestermagazine.com/content/view/2472/. 
6. ^ Look Out, America: Charles P. Pierce Is Coming to This Blog http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/charles-p-pierce-blog-6420453
7. ^ Pierce, Charles P. (2010-01-28). "Charles Pierce Reaction to State of the Union - Obama State of the Union 2010". Esquire. http://www.esquire.com/the-side/opinion/reaction-to-state-of-the-union-2010-012810?click=esq_new. Retrieved 2010-01-29. 
8. ^ http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2010/02/01/nine-days-election-boston-globe-s-pierce-ridiculed-notion-brown-could-w#ixzz0eI6sGJlh

External links

• Official Website
• Biography at Only A Game Website
• The Politics Blog with Charles P. Pierce

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Name	Pierce, Charlie
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Date of birth	1953-12-28
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