Bleeding Pinstripes: A Season with the Bleacher Creatures at Yankee Stadium
Filip Bondy is an award-winning sports columnist for the New York Daily News. He has traveled from Doha, Qatar, to Harare, Zimbabwe, while covering some very famous and some extremely obscure sports events. Bondy’s reports and humorous diaries have chronicled Wimbledon, the Olympics, the World Cup and camel racing. Closer to home, Bondy created the Bleacher Creature feature that gave a public voice to the boisterous fans in Section 39 at Yankee Stadium. Bondy first worked at The News in 1983, after a decade in news, features and sports with the defunct Paterson News and Bergen Record (he panned "Evita" as a theater critic, predicting it wouldn't last a week). He returned to The News as a columnist in 1993, following a stint at the New York Times. During his eclectic career, he was a beat reporter covering the Yankees, Nets, Knicks, Rangers, Tonya Harding and the national marbles championships. In 2003, his stories were ranked in the top 10 nationally in two different writing categories by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Bondy graduated from the University of Wisconsin and earned a master's at the University of Pennsylvania. This is his fourth sports book, his first on baseball. The "F" in Filip is Czech—his father grew up in Prague. You can call him "Flip," the way they do in the bleachers, and he won’t mind. Bondy is married to LynNell Hancock, aka Mrs. Creature, a professor of journalism at Columbia. He has two children and a grandson. Mostly, Bondy wants to play right midfield for Boca Juniors.