Mike Bolton, an award-winning sports and outdoors writer for more than 40 years in the Birmingham News and on AL.com, died Friday, his wife, Beth, confirmed. He was 70.
Bolton — the son of legendary Birmingham News sports writer and columnist Clyde Bolton — also covered NASCAR, college football and other sports for The News full-time beginning in 1984, but made his greatest mark on the outdoors page. A 1980 graduate of the University of Alabama, Bolton wrote a popular and humor-filled outdoors column for The News beginning in 1987 and continued to do so almost continuously until his final byline appeared on AL.com on Dec. 13, 2024.
“He was a great friend, a great teammate at the Birmingham News, and one of the most incredible writers I’ve ever known,” longtime Birmingham News high school sports editor Ron Ingram said. “Mike had a way with words, and his sense of humor was just uncanny.
“One of my favorite memories of him is that he named his boat ‘On Assignment,’ So any time you called his house, his wife would say, ‘Well, he’s not here. He’s ‘On Assignment.’ … That’s just the way his mind worked. He could take just a normal situation and make it incredible.”
Bolton — who also wrote for the Alabama Journal, Montgomery Advertiser, Dothan Eagle and Tuscaloosa News, among other publications — won the Associated Press Sweepstakes eight times in one 11-year stretch and won the 2000 and 2002 Alabama Sports Writers Association Herby Kirby Award for story of the year. In 1996, his four-part Birmingham News series The Cahaba: A River in Crisis was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
In 2022, Bolton and his father were named together among the 50 Legends of the ASWA. Mike Bolton was also inducted into the St. Clair County Sports Hall of Fame that same year.
Ingram said he first got to know Bolton in the early 1980s when Ingram was working at the Dothan Progress and Bolton was sports editor of the Southeast Sun in Enterprise. A few years later, they became colleagues at the Birmingham News.
“We’re gonna miss his talents, but we’re gonna miss his personality and his humor and just his friendship,” Ingram said. “We’ve lost one of our great journalists, especially great sports journalists.”
As talented a writer as he was on the subject, Bolton was also an active and dedicated outdoorsman. He received the Governor’s Conservation Award and twice won the Buckmaster’s Classic hunting competition.
“Dad was my best friend and my hero from day one,” daughter Lauren Davis wrote in a Facebook post. “I was blessed with a wonderful father who truly loved me and my brother. I was a tomboy with her dad as her sidekick — I was so lucky to be his girl. From endless hunting and fishing trips, to waking me up in the middle of the night Waffle House trips, he made my childhood fun and so memorable. I had some of my absolute best memories of my life with him, and some of those memories that were my best days, were probably ‘just another day’ for him. We never had to be doing anything extraordinary to have a good time.”
Former Birmingham News sports writer Mike Bolton, right, is shown with NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon in Birmingham in 2007. (Birmingham News file photo by Joe Songer)Birmingham News fileBolton left The News full-time in 2009 to open up Big Bolton’s BBQ (later Big Bolton’s BBQ and Steakhouse) in Springville, which he operated with his son, Cory. In 2013, Mike Bolton authored The Ultimate Guide to Alabama Fishing, a 320-page volume featuring tips on the best angling spots in the state.
Joe Songer, longtime Birmingham News and AL.com photographer and one of Bolton’s close friends, shared the following in a Facebook post:
“He was one of a kind and I am a better person for knowing him,” Songer wrote. “We covered so many stories together for the Birmingham News over 30 years it’s hard to fathom. It was always fun. I learned so much from him. He is one of the best story tellers I’ve ever known. I will miss him terribly.”
Bolton is survived by his father, Clyde; his wife, Beth; son Cory Bolton, daughter Lauren (Skylar) Davis and grandson, Dakota. A “Celebration of Life” will take place, Monday, Feb. 2, at Clearbranch Methodist Church in Trussville (8051 Glenn Road) from 12-2 p.m., followed by a funeral service at 2 p.m.