Bob Mitchell has been a certifiable sports nut since birth. Passionate about sports—as a fan, a coach, and a player—he is a devoted student/scholar of all major and minor sports, lettered in three sports at Williams College (soccer, squash, tennis), and has taught tennis professionally. Had his mother not “accidentally” tossed out his entire baseball-card collection when he left for college in the fall of 1962, he would now be retired on his own Mediterranean island, reading Proust in a hammock and being hand-fed grapes by his large, attentive staff.
Bob is the author of three novels, all of which are, naturally, about the profound relationship between sports and life. Match Made in Heaven, a tale of golf and human frailty, is in its second printing (from Kensington) and is available worldwide in six languages and in audiotape (Brilliance) and e-book (Kindle) formats. Once Upon a Fastball (again, at Kensington) is a tale of baseball and history and has been optioned as a feature film to Nash Entertainment, a successful Hollywood production company. Everything on the Line, a novel about tennis and the forces of Good and Evil, is available as an e-book (Untreed Reads) and an audiobook (Audible). He is presently working on a fourth novel, Masaccio’s Gift, and a collection of short stories, A Slut Nixes Sex in Tulsa.
He has also published three nonfiction books about sports: The Heart Has Its Reasons: Reflections on Sports and Life, The Tao of Sports, and How My Mother Accidentally Tossed Out My Entire Baseball-Card Collection (and Other Sports Stories).
Bob’s books have received critical acclaim from such people as James Patterson, Larry King, Senator
 Bill Bradley, Bob Costas, Dick Schaap, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Tim McCarver,
 Fay Vincent, Ann Liguori, Chris Berman, T. Jefferson Parker, Joshua Prager, Dan Shaughnessy, Jim Nantz, Bud Collins, and Mary Carillo.
Mitchell was educated at Poly Prep, Williams (B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude), Columbia (M.A. in French Literature, Woodrow Wilson fellow), and Harvard (Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature). In a former life, he spent a year teaching in France on a Fulbright fellowship and was a French professor for eleven years at Harvard, Purdue, and Ohio State, during which time he published four books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. In another former life, he was an advertising Creative Director at a number of New York agencies for eleven more years and spent 1994 in Tel Aviv as a special consultant on commercial film writing and production.
Bob’s passions include sports, writing, reading, travel, animals, music, art, and playing acoustic guitar. He speaks seven languages and has lived, at various times, in Paris, Brittany, London, Florence, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Morocco, and Montreal. He resides in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife, Susan Love (an artist).
