Leigh Montville knew he wanted to be a sports writer at the age of ten; decades later and in his seventies, Leigh Montville is a respected elder statesman of sports journalism and still living out his childhood dream. He began his career as a reporter for the New Haven Journal-Courier, and later beginning his twenty-one-year first stint as a columnist for the Boston Globe. He left the Globe for a position as a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, which he held for twelve years. He stopped writing for Sports Illustrated in the early 2000s and shifted his focus to writing books, although he rejoined the Boston Globe staff in 2013. Some of his titles are The Altar of Speed (2001), The Mysterious Montague (2008), Evel (2011), and The Big Bam (2006). His 2004 biography of the famous Red Sox player, Ted Williams, won the CASEY Award for best baseball book of the year. His latest is Like a Bee: Muhammad Ali vs. The United States of America, 1966–1971, which focuses on boxer Muhammad Ali’s refusal to join the military and the cultural and political implications of his protests during such a turbulent period in both Ali’s life and in American history.