Kurkjian attended Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, where he played on the school’s basketball and baseball teams. At the suggestion of his basketball coach, Kurkjian began writing for the student newspaper, The Pitch, and the school’s yearbook, “The Wind-up.” He eventually became the sports editor of The Pitch and realized that journalism would be the surest means of fulfilling his childhood dream of making a living in professional sports. He graduated from the school in 1974.

In 1974, Kurkjian enrolled at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. While at Maryland, Kurkjian covered high school sports for his hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Journal. Immediately after graduating from Maryland with a B.A. in journalism in 1978, Kurkjian took an entry-level position with the Washington Star. By 1981, he became a staff writer. When the Star folded that year, he took a position with the Baltimore News-American. That paper also went out of business within two months of Kurkjian’s arrival. He began covering baseball as the Texas Rangers beat writer for The Dallas Morning News where he worked from 1981 to 1985. Kurkjian then covered the Baltimore Orioles for The Baltimore Sun beginning in 1986. He was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated from 1989 to 1997. In 1997, Sports Illustrated reassigned him to covering basketball. He served in this capacity for six months before accepting a job at ESPN as a baseball writer and television journalist in 1998 at 40 years old.

On November 26, 1983, Kurkjian married Kathleen Patrick. Kathy is a lawyer. The couple has one daughter, Kelly, an artist, and one son, Jeff, who hosts Jeff & Aimee in the Morning on KCYE radio in Las Vegas. Both Kelly and Jeff graduated from Syracuse University. His cousins are Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stephen Kurkjian and Bob Kurkjian, an engineering teacher at the Learning Prep School in West Newton, MA.

He authored his first book, America’s Game, in 2000 and released his second book, Is This a Great Game, or What?: From A-Rod’s Heart to Zim’s Head—My 25 Years in Baseball in May 2007. In 2016, he published his book I’m Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies: Inside the Game We All Love. He was the 1999 and 2007 Commencement speaker at his alma mater, Walter Johnson High School, the 2008 speaker at Seneca Valley High School, and also delivered the winter commencement speech at the University of Maryland on December 19, 2007.

In 2012, while Kurkjian and fellow ESPN analyst John Kruk were on their annual bus tour around the spring training facilities, a new craze was created called Kurkjianing where players would impersonate Tim Kurkjian during interviews. Some of the players that did this were Tim Dillard of the Brewers, J. P. Arencibia of the Rangers, and Elliot Johnson of the Rays.