best known for investigative stories on the Los Angeles Dodgers' clubhouse resentment of "golden boy" Steve Garvey and his celebrity wife Cyndy, and on Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom's behind-the-scenes decisions to start different quarterbacks each week. Bayless won the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Newspaper Writing in 1977 for his coverage of Seattle Slew's Triple Crown victory. At 26, Bayless was hired by The Dallas Morning News to write its lead sports column, and three years later, joined the Dallas Times Herald. This caught the attention of The Wall Street Journal, prompting the paper to do a story on the development. Bayless was voted Texas sportswriter of the year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association three times (1979, 1984 and 1986). In 1989, Bayless wrote his first book, God's Coach: The Hymns, Hype and Hypocrisy of Tom Landry's Cowboys, about the rise and fall of Tom Landry's Dallas Cowboys. Following the Cowboys' Super Bowl victory in 1993, Bayless wrote The Boys: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys' Season on the Edge, and following the third Cowboys Super Bowl win in four seasons, Bayless wrote a third book about the Cowboys, Hell-Bent: The Crazy Truth About the "Win or Else" Dallas Cowboys. Hell-Bent caused a stir, in part, because in the course of writing about the conflict between Cowboys coach Barry Switzer and star quarterback Troy Aikman, Bayless reported on speculation by Switzer and people close to him within the Dallas organization that Aikman was gay. In 1998, Bayless left Dallas after 17 years and become the lead sports columnist for the Chicago Tribune. In his first year there, Bayless won the Lisagor Award for excellence in sports column writing, presented by the Chicago Headline Club (the Chicago chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists). In 2000, he was voted Illinois sportswriter of the year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. Bayless left the Chicago Tribune in July 2001. Bayless's work has also appeared in various national sports publications, including Sports Illustrated. Radio In 1991, Bayless began a two-year stint hosting a sports talk radio show from 6–8 p.m. Monday through Friday for Dallas radio station KLIF. In 1994, he became one of the original investors in the Fort Worth radio station KTCK ("the Ticket"), and hosted The Skip Bayless Show from 6–9 a.m. weekdays from 1994–96. In 1996, the original owners sold the station to Cumulus Media, which