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Jim Caple (1980)

Name
Jim Caple
Class
1980
Category
HoF Lifetime Achievement
Induction Year
2020

Jim grew up in Longview and met his good friend and fellow R.A. Long Hall of Famer, Dan Little, on the way to their first day of kindergarten. They attended school together from kindergarten through college and remain good friends.

He went to R.A. Long from fall of 1977 to spring of 1980 and went into acting, starring often in school plays and musicals, including “Once Upon a Mattress’’ and “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown,’’ in which he played Snoopy, perhaps his favorite cartoon character.  He also gave the graduation speech weeks after the Mount St. Helens eruption May 18th that ended the senior class school year.

While earning his degree in communications at the University of Washington, he worked at the university paper The Daily.  He began his sports writing career working for the Bellevue Journal-American.  Then he moved to Minnesota in 1989 where he covered the Minnesota Twins, the Olympics, and other sports.  He also interviewed his boyhood hero, Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, several times.  In Minnesota he met and married his “wonderful, beautiful, and brilliant wife”, Vicki Schuman.

He moved back to Seattle in 2000 and wrote one year for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  He then worked full-time for ESPN from 2001-17, covering virtually every sport on six continents, but primarily baseball, tennis, cycling, and the Olympics.

He currently writes freelance stories for the UW alumni magazine, Maven/Sports Illustrated, Red Line (which covers the Olympics), SportsPress NW, Mariners Magazine, and, occasionally, the Washington Post.  He has written several books, including “The Devil Wears Pinstripes’’, “Best Boston Sports Arguments’’ and the novel, "The Navigator,'' loosely based on his father who was a B-24 navigator in World War II.  (His sister and fellow R.A. Long grad, Kathy Caple, also has written and illustrated many children’s books.)

He and Vicki live in the Seattle area and travel often.