Business, Culture and Media 2022
Mississippi's Top 50 Most Influential
Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN, executive producer of TrueSouth, a contributor to The Atlantic. He has covered a wide range of sports issues, from football, basketball, and baseball, to car racing, sports history, and bullfighting.
Thompson’s 2010 article Ghosts of Mississippi inspired the 2012 ESPN 30 for 30 series documentary film The Ghosts of Ole Miss, which he narrated, about the 1962 football team’s perfect season and concurrent violence and rioting over integration of the segregated university by James Meredith. He also narrated the ESPN 30 for 30 film Roll Tide/War Eagle.
He is also the author of The Cost of These Dreams and Pappyland. Thompson is a native of Clarksdale, and now lives with his family in Oxford.