William C. Rhoden

William C. Rhoden is a sports journalist and author, who formerly worked as a columnist for the New York Times from 1983 until his retirement in 2016.

Rhoden was born in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Morgan State University from 1968 to 1973, and played on the 1968 Morgan State Bears football team that beat the Grambling Tigers in Yankee Stadium, the annual match known as the "Whitney Young Classic". After graduating from college, he worked for the Afro-American Times, the Baltimore Sun, and eventually Ebony where he became a columnist for magazine from 1974 to 1978. In 1983, Rhoden joined the New York Times staff as a sports columnist.

In 2006, he published his first book, the Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete, an original and perceptive analysis of the racist history and current reality of professional sports in the United States.