An Evening with John U Bacon

New York Times bestselling author John U. Bacon has worked for more than three decades as a writer, public speaker, college instructor, radio and TV commentator, and high school hockey coach, winning awards for all five.

Bacon earned an honors degree in history (“pre-unemployment”) from the University of Michigan in 1986, and a Master’s in Education in 1994. In 2005-06, the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship named him the first recipient of the Benny Friedman Fellowship for Sports Journalism.

He started his journalism career covering high school sports for The Ann Arbor News, and then wrote a light-hearted lifestyle column before becoming the Sunday sports feature writer for The Detroit News in 1995. He earned numerous state and national awards for his work, including “Notable Sports Writing” in The Best American Sports Writing in 1998, 2000, and 2008.

After Bacon covered the 1998 Nagano Olympics, he moved from the Detroit News’s sports page to the Sunday front page, roaming the Great Lakes State to find fresh features. He left the paper in 1999 to free-lance for some two dozen national publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, ESPN Magazine, and Time magazine.

He has authored fourteen books on sports, business, health, and history, eight of which are national bestsellers, including:

Bo’s Lasting Lessons: The Legendary Coach Teaches the Timeless Fundamentals of Leadership,Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football, Fourth & Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football, Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football,

John Saunders’ Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope, which Bacon coauthored,

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism, Overtime: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football, and, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

In 2021 he wrote a first-person account of his experience turning around the Ann Arbor Huron River Rats’ hockey program, Let Them Lead: Unexpected Lessons in Leadership from America’s Worst High School Hockey Team, which was featured in The New York Times and on Good Morning America, which called him “The REAL Ted Lasso.” It is now in its fifth printing.

In 2022 he published The Greatest Comeback: How Team Canada Fought Back, Took the Summit Series, and Reinvented Hockey, with HarperCollins-Canada.

In 2025, he authored the New York Times Best Seller The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, with W.W. Norton/Liveright, the definitive account of the tragic shipwreck from 1975. It has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CBS Saturday Morning, NPR Morning Edition, and PBS, among others, and received a “starred review” in Kirkus.

Bacon has also pursued his passions for radio, television, coaching, and teaching. Since 2007 he has given weekly sports commentary on Michigan Radio on Friday mornings, and also appears weekly on WTKA Sports Talk 1050’s The Michigan Insider, and occasionally on National Public Radio, which awarded him the PRNDI prize for nation’s best commentary (all subjects) in 2014. He appears often on TV, including HBO, ESPN, Fox Business, MSNBC, PBS, and the Big Ten Network, where he has been a frequent contributor.

Bacon has taught at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and the University of Michigan, where the students selected him for the 2009 Golden Apple award, given annually to the students’ favorite teacher.

On the side, Bacon became the head coach of his former high school hockey team, Ann Arbor Huron. As a player in the early eighties, he set the record for most games in a Huron uniform without scoring a goal, 86 (he’s not braggin’ – he’s just sayin’). As a coach, he took over the worst team in school history (0-23-3 in 1999-2000), and helped transform them into the best (17-4-5, #4 in the state, and #53 in the nation), in just three seasons. In 2007, he was inducted into the Huron River Rat Hall of Fame. Bacon told this story, with the leadership lessons, in Let Them Lead.

A popular speaker, Bacon delivers speeches on the themes taken from his books, and coaching and teaching experiences — including leadership, creativity, storytelling, and motivating the next generation — to corporations, universities, health care organizations, and other groups around the country and the world. In 2011, the Michigan Chapter of Meeting Planners International (MMPI) named him “Speaker of the Year.”

Bacon is now an average hockey player, a mediocre Spanish speaker, and a poor piano player – but this has not stopped him from enjoying all three. He lives in Ann Arbor and Northern Michigan with his wife and son.