Spike Vrusho

Spike Vrusho is a 56-year-old underground sports journalist who specializes in spectator/fan behavior and deviance relative to punk rock tendencies and counter-cultural milieus. His background is in 1980s baseball fanzines. His brief television writing career involved freelance assignments from ESPN Classic, NFL Films and Major League Baseball Productions, including uncredited work on the award-winning "Yankeeography" series. He writes frequently about baseball and soccer and was the editor of the scandalous weekly tabloid "New York Sports Express" that made some noise in Manhattan in the mid 2000s as a vocal opponent to Mayor Bloomberg's silly and wasteful campaign to fool the IOC into awarding the 2012 Olympics to New York City. Spike is a third-generation Pittsburgh Pirates loyalist and was aboard such sinking journalistic ships as The New York Sun and the Poughkeepsie Journal playing the role of copy editor. Prior to that he was a contributing writer to the weekly New York Press and before that a reporter and columnist at The Brooklyn Paper and a columnist for Brooklyn Bridge magazine. Vrusho now lives in upstate New York and has freelanced for the Mobile Press-Register in Alabama and the London-based culture magazine "Standpoint" and high-brow culture site The Article.com. Just prior to leaving Brooklyn, he was a contributing gag writer on the ESPN Classic comedy show "Cheap Seats." In the fall of 2011, Vrusho turned in his taxi keys to write voiceover scripts for the WWE Network, which paid well but failed to meet its launch date April of 2012 by which time Spike was back behind the wheel of a taxi. In 2013, Vrusho began contributing to former NY Press publisher Russ Smith's www.splicetoday.com cultural website, where he feels very much at home. In the summer of 2016, he published two issues of a semi-pro soccer fanzine called The Fence Post, the unofficial fanzine of Kingston Stockade FC. The Fence Post continued during Kingston's amazing second season, with Vrusho and his daughter Roxanne producing and distributing five more issues. They followed up with a third season of fanzine publishing, establishing The Fence Post as a snarky, print-only low-level football culture chronicle in the DIY tradition.

"Benchclearing: Baseball's Greatest Fights and Riots" is his first book. Vrusho is a graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, named the Princeton Review's top-ranking "party school" for 2011.