Former ESPN motorsports writer Ed Hinton dies at 76

Ed Hinton, an ESPN Senior Writer who specialized in motorsports before retiring in 2014, died on Thursday at Brookwood Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama. He was 76 years old.

Hinton, who graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a degree in journalism, also wrote for Sports Illustrated during a celebrated 47-year career.

Before joining ESPN in 2008, he signed on with the Tribune Company newspaper chain, writing motorsports for the flagship Chicago Tribune, as well as member newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel. He was also an editor for a short time in Orlando.

Hinton covered multiple sports and teams throughout his career, but truly found his sweet spot at the nation’s race tracks, where he was able to relive glory days from his youth. In fact, in his farewell entry at ESPN on Dec, 31, 2014, he noted that “most sports writers have grown up on baseball, football, basketball, maybe hockey, and so they cover what they know — what they played and watched in youth. I had one more in my background: auto racing. I’d started going to dirt tracks at age 10.”

As he walked away from the industry at 66 years old, he looked back fondly, in that last story, about covering the likes of Bo Jackson, Bear Bryant, Mickey Mantle, and Muhammad Ali, but he was never too far from the auto racing world, and called his final outlet, ESPN, “more devoted to the subject than any media organization ever.”

Hinton, like many career sportswriters, delved into the literary world as well, penning “Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black,” which was released in November 2002.

Source: espn.com