Frederick C. Klein

Who is Frederick C. Klein?

Frederick C. Klein is an American sportswriter and the author or co-author of 12 books on sports and business. From 1977 to 2001, Klein was the Wall Street Journal’s first-ever sports columnist, writing the Journal’s twice-weekly sports column, "On Sports".

Klein was born in Chicago and was raised in the city’s Ravenswood neighborhood. A multi-sport letterman at Roosevelt High School, he also began writing as a high school student. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and wrote both for the student Daily Illini and for the Champaign-Urbana Courier. Graduating from Illinois in 1959, Klein entered Harvard Law School, but left after a term to pursue journalistic opportunities and graduate work at the University of Michigan.

In 1962, Klein joined the staff of the Pittsburgh Press, and joined the Wall Street Journal’s Pittsburgh bureau in 1963, first covering the steel beat. Moving on to the Journal’s main office in New York in 1967 and to the Chicago bureau in 1969, Klein increasingly focused on writing some of the newspaper’s signature Page One features.