Michael Rosenberg is a sports columnist at the Detroit Free Press, where he has worked since 1999, and a featured columnist for Foxsports.com . He has been named one of the top 10 sports columnists in the country by the Associated Press Sports Editors, and his work has been featured in The Best American Sports Writing. Before arriving at the Free Press, he worked at the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Sacramento Bee.

Michael has always wanted to write a book, but first he had to learn to walk, eat solid food, read, type and drink beer. He had accomplished most of these tasks by the age of 19, but that is when he discovered that he really, really liked beer. This set the book-writing process back another 10 years.

In the spring of 2005, Michael began to work on “War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and America in a Time of Unrest.” But he didn’t really know it at the time. All he knew was that he was fascinated by the Hayes-Schembechler rivalry; that Woody Hayes had visited the troops in Vietnam four times; that Hayes was friend of Nixon and generals; that Schembechler arrived in Ann Arbor at a time when it was actually NOT COOL to be a football player; and that Don Canham, the athletic director who hired Schembechler, created the biggest marketing phenomenon in college sports. This stuff all sounded like the seeds of a book.

During one of his first interviews with Bo Schembechler, in 2005, Bo said that the real unwritten story of his rivalry with Woody was the era in which they faced each other. This was all Michael needed to hear. He then did nearly two hundred interviews with former players, coaches, administrators and radicals, consulted 50 or so books, did more hours of library research than he cares to remember and hired two other researchers to do more library work. Over time, he discovered that the arc of the Woody-Bo story was more fascinating than he realized, and that it was inextricably woven into the changes in America from 1969 to 1978, when the two coaches faced each other. Grand Central Publishing gave Michael almost two years to finish the book; Michael said thank you and took three.

Michael lives in Michigan with his wife, Erin, and their daughter, Audrey.

E-mail Michael or for media inquiries, please e-mail Elly Weisenberg .