KORNHEISER, TONY

KORNHEISER, TONY (Anthony Irwin; 1948– ), U.S. sportswriter, radio talk show host, newspaper columnist. Kornheiser grew up in Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island. He celebrated his bar mitzvah in a Conservative synagogue, and the Kornheisers celebrated the Jewish holidays. Kornheiser graduated from Harpur College in upstate New York, now part of SUNY-Binghamton, in 1970, and taught elementary school for a year. He then went to work as a feature writer for New York Newsday, covering general-interest stories and writing a weekly column on rock music. In 1976, he left Newsday to join the sports section of The New York Times and was hired by The Washington Post in 1979, becoming a sports columnist there in 1984. Kornheiser hosted a radio show on WTEM-AM in Washington, D.C., beginning in 1992, and joined ESPN Radio in November 1997 as host of The Tony Kornheiser Show, which premiered January 5, 1998. Kornheiser then began working at ESPN television, co-hosting the popular Pardon the Interruption (PTI) show, which debuted on September 22, 2001. His Satellite Radio show debuted on February 28, 2005, on XM   Channel 2002. Kornheiser is the author of a non-sports book, The Baby Chase (1983), about infertility and adopting a child, and three compilations of his newspaper columns: Pumping Irony: Working Out the Angst of a Lifetime (1995), Bald As I Wanna Be (1997), and I'm Back for More Cash: A Tony Kornheiser Collection (Because You Can't Take Two Hundred Newspapers into the Bathroom) (2003). (Elli Wohlgelernter (2nd ed.)