Steve Rushin was born in Elmhurst, Illinois on September 22, 1966 and grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota. After graduating from Marquette University in 1988, he joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, where he was a writer for 19 years.

Called "The best sportswriter in the country" (by the St. Paul Pioneer Press) and "certainly the most fun to read" (by the Hartford Courant), Rushin has also been described as "one of the most agile essayists around" by Publishers Weekly, which listed his book "Road Swing" among the Best Books of 1998. Money magazine called the book "one of the funniest travelogues ever written" and Sports Illustrated named "Road Swing" one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.

A collection of Rushin's travel and sports writing - The Caddie Was a Reindeer: And Other Tales of Extreme Recreation - was published by Grove/Atlantic in 2005. It was named a semifinalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Rushin is a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award and his work has appeared in the Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Travel Writing and the Best American Sports Writing Anthologies. His essays have appeared in Time magazine and The New York Times, among other publications.

His 1994 story "How We Got Here" remains the longest ever published in a single issue of Sports Illustrated.

For his dispatches from the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, Rushin was awarded the Prix des Medias Olympiques for "excellence in journalism in the coverage of the Games."

From 1998 to 2007, Rushin wrote a weekly column called Air & Space, which was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2004.

In 2006, Rushin was named the National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association.

On May 20, 2007, Rushin delivered the commencement address at Marquette University, where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters for "his unique gift of documenting the human condition through his writing."

Rushin and his wife, Rebecca Lobo, live in Connecticut with their two children.