Biography

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Robert K. Ottum page on 30 May 2024, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Robert Keith Ottum, known as Robert K. Ottum and Bob Ottum was an American sports journalist specializing in motorsport and writer of science fiction and thrillers. He was editor in chief of Sports Illustrated.

Ottum was born in Duluth, Minnesota, to Charles Reynolds and Lee R. Lafay. He joined the Navy in his teens and served on an attack transport in the Pacific during World War II. Shortly after the war, he lived in San Francisco. He joined Utah newspaper The Salt Lake Tribune in 1946 despite a lack of journalistic experience and rose to executive news editor. In 1964, Ottum quit the Tribune and joined Sports Illustrated, a job for which he moved to New York City. While he wrote about motorsport in particular, he reported on a wide range of sports and covered five Winter Olympics and Summer Olympics.

In July 1968, and again a few months later, auto racer Mickey Thompson and his crew took three recently built 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1s to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and broke a total of 295 FIA speed and endurance records. Ottum was one of the drivers; his article about the experience was published in the August 19, 1968, issue of Sports Illustrated under the title "Old Marshmallow Foot" (a reference to the fact that Ottum had "never driven a car in anger").

Stand on It (1973), written jointly with auto racer, writer and actor William Neely, is a fictional autobiography of hard-living, hard-driving racer "Stroker Ace", based loosely on stock car racer Curtis Turner. The novel was adapted as the action comedy Stroker Ace (1983) starring Burt Reynolds.p>

Bibliography