Jackson Free Press

Rick Cleveland steps out of the melting Mississippi heat and into Sneaky Beans in Fondren. "It was a mistake to walk here," he says. "I hate this heat, and I hate Yazoo clay."

Cleveland is a Mississippi native, born and raised in Hattiesburg, and a perennial winner for Best Columnist in the Jackson Free Press' annual "Best Of" reader poll for his sports writing at The Clarion-Ledger.

"It's a great honor to be chosen as Jackson's best columnist, but it isn't really fair," he says. "You see, Donna (Ladd) is a great writer, but she usually only writes one column a week, whereas I write four or five columns a week. I could write two or three stinkers and still have time to redeem myself."

Cleveland and his family have spent many years in the Jackson area, first residing in Rankin County and then moving to Fondren so that his daughter, Annie, could attend Murrah High School's Academic and Performing Arts Complex.

"I love Fondren, especially the diversity, the convenience, the people and the music scene," he says.

Writing is a Cleveland family tradition. Cleveland's brother Bobby is an outdoors columnist and assistant sports editor for The Clarion-Ledger and his son, Tyler, is trying his hand at sports writing in Hattiesburg. His father, Robert "Ace" Cleveland, was a sports writer for the Hattiesburg American in the late 1940s and the Jackson Daily News in the '50s. Ace was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame posthumously in 1998.

Rick Cleveland has been writing about Mississippi sports for more than four decades, but still has a never-ending enthusiasm for sports. "Each game is a passion play," he says.

He has been to 26 Super Bowls, yet Cleveland says he would rather spend Friday night at a high-school football game such as Weir vs. Mize, the perennial class 1A rivalry before Mize moved up. "The whole town is involved with those games, and it is as close to the pure game as you can get," he says.

Cleveland has covered many famous Mississippi athletes and recites from memory a long list that includes Walter Payton, Jerry Rice, Archie Manning, Ray Guy and Brett Favre. His most memorable sports moment wasn't football, though, but soccer. "Watching the 2006 World Cup final between the French and the Italians with my family in an Italian bar in London, England," he says.

"When Zindane head butted the Italian player, the bar went crazy. When the Italians won, we all poured out of the bar into the street and started dancing. It was amazing."

In describing his love of sports writing, Cleveland quotes his great friend and mentor, the late Mississippi author Willie Morris: "We always write best about the things that we care about best."