Doug Merlino

Merlino grew up in Seattle, Washington and attended the Lakeside School.[1] He studied government at Claremont McKenna College[2] in Los Angeles, and received graduate degrees in journalism and international affairs from the University of California, Berkeley.[3] He lived in Budapest, Hungary, where he worked as an editor at the Budapest Business Journal.[4] He is married and now lives in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of New York City.[3]

Merlino has worked for publications including Slate, Wired, Men's Journal, the Budapest Business Journal, and the Seattle Times.[3] He reported on post-genocide reconciliation in Rwanda for the PBS show Frontline/World.[5]

Merlino's first book, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White,[6] was published in January 2011. The nonfiction book tells the story of a basketball team that Merlino played on as a 14-year-old in the 1986.[7] The team, an integration experiment, mixed privileged white players from Merlino's private school with African-American kids from Seattle's Central Area. The boys won an AAU championship that season, and the organizers began a program to enroll some of the black players in private schools.[8]

Several years later Merlino learned that Tyrell Johnson, one of his African-American teammates, had been murdered and dismembered.[1] This spurred him to track down the remaining players to find out what happened to them, and how they looked back at their team. They include a hedge fund manager, a Pentecostal preacher, a prosecutor, a frequently incarcerated cocaine addict, a winemaker, and a street hustler.[6][9] The resulting book tells the story of these individuals, but also focuses on the shifting dynamics of race and class, manhood, education and gentrification over the last thirty years.[10] Many of the players and coaches from the team reunited in January 2011 for a televised panel discussion that coincided with the release of the book.[11]

Merlino's second full-length book, Beast: Blood, Struggle and Dreams at the Heart of Mixed Martial Arts [12] was published in 2015. It details two years that Merlino spent following professional MMA fighters from elite American Top Team in Florida.[13] The main fighters profiled include Jeff Monson, an American anarchist rising to fame on the Russian fight circuit; Daniel Straus, a Cincinnati native fighting his way toward a title shot after a stint in prison; Steve Mocco, an NCAA champion wrestler and Olympian attempting to make the transition to cage fighting; and Mirsad Bektic, a Bosnian refugee and one of the sport’s top prospects.[14] The book was praised for its gritty realism in outlets ranging from No Holds Barred[15] to the New York Times Book Review.[16]

Merlino has also published an e-book, The Crossover: A Brief History of Basketball and Race, from James Naismith to Lebron James.[17]

Merlino received the 2011 Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir for The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White.[18]

• Official website
• Bloomsbury USA page