Mulcahy Conway Associates

Jon Henderson

Jon Henderson started as a journalist with the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, before leaving to report on the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City for Reuters. He spent the next 20 years at Reuters and reported on sports events around the world, including five Olympic Games, two football World Cups and five England cricket tours. He covered Wimbledon for the first time in 1969, the year after the start of the Open era, and has returned to report on the championships ever since.

In 1991 he joined The Observer, where he worked – latterly for The Guardian as well – as an editor and covering sport generally and tennis in particular. He left the papers in 2009 to concentrate on writing books. He still does freelance journalism. In addition to his journalism and book writing, he has contributed to Wisden and Encyclopaedia Britannica, assisted J.A. Cuddon in producing the Dictionary of Sport and Games (Macmillan, 1981), and has worked as a broadcaster.

Jon wrote The Last Champion: The Life of Fred Perry (Yellow Jersey Press, Random House, May 2009), the first biography of this sporting and fashion icon. His Best of British: Hendo’s Sporting Heroes (Yellow Jersey, October 2007) was a celebration of the nation’s 100 greatest sporting heroes. He is currently working on the first biography of the complete life of Stanley Matthews the footballer. His chronicle of this extraordinary sportsman provides the most thorough examination yet of Matthews’s uniquely long playing career – from the adulation and heroic deeds to the criticism of the way he played. It also includes the first outside account of the love affair that made his later years no less remarkable than those that preceded them. It will be published by Yellow Jersey in 2013.