: About Me

IVOR IRWIN is originally from Manchester, England. Recently retired from academia after getting chest-cracked for a bypass, I'm finally starting to write about stuff I like, rather than making relentless compromise over money and collegiality. No more bullshit plagiarism from clueless graduate students. No more bureaucratic angst. I was lost. Now I am found. It is a religious experience, where writing itself is the God and the drug. A good example would be a book called 'A Peacock or A Crow,' a piece of collaborative nonficion about the adoption crisis in Romania. It was not a subject I was particularly interested in, but I let a very persuasive academic friend talk me into participation. The more I got to know the folks involved, and heard their stories, the more engrossing the project became. How awful it was then, that this ex-friend of an academic insisted I cut away massive amounts of carefully researched investigative reporting and interviews because certain rich people didn't want some stories to be told. It's the oldest story ever for writers, but I fell out with a very good friend and the book is a sloppy embarrassment. So, anyway, now I write about food, and travel, film, and the dearest subject to my heart, Manchester United F.C., a major soccer team in England. I have a daughter, 29, a son, 27, and a younger boy, aged nine. My wife is a technical writer who longs to retire to write, too. Ruidoso, New Mexico is where I want to be. Chicago is where I've lived since 1977, with short breaks to New Haven, P-Town, Mass., and Peterborough, New Hampshire in between. How many more winters can I take?

Politics, News & Issues > Sports Archives Reflections on Premiership coaches leaving their teams in 2007

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A season ends bringing about change, but usually it takes a tad longer. Three days after the conclusion of the Premiership season, three managers left their jobs, following Glenn Roeder who took his coup-de-grace a fortnight before. The style of each departure was very different. A punk rocking 44-year-old who only turned off his ipod when the chairman arrived at a board meeting, and put them right back on after rbeing canned, before gathering his notes and exiting the room. A knackered 42-year-old, leaving after a superbly plotted victory away from home, for, he insisted, some desperately...

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