By Leonard Shecter Look November 18, 1969 The day in 1966 when AI Davis, who now runs the Oakland Raiders with a small, iron fist, was appointed commissioner of the American Football League, he leaned over the shoulder of the young publicist who was typing the...
By Leonard Shecter Esquire January 1968 One of the favorite things of Vince Lombardi, coach, general manager and spiritual leader of the world-champion Green Bay Packers, is the grass drill. He lets an assistant coach lead the bending and stretching exercises, the...
By John Lardner True February 1956 The hotel manager and the detective stood looking down at the man on the bed, who had killed himself during the night. “Norman Selby, it says on the note, and Selby was how he checked in,” the manager said. “Wasn’t that his right...
By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 Flying west, through Texas, you leave Dallas-Fort Worth behind and look out suddenly onto a rolling, bare-boned, November country that stretches away to the horizon on every side—a vast, landlocked Sargasso Sea of mesquite-dotted...
By Paul Hemphill Sport 1975 Ahoskie, North Carolina There is something in the old baseball scout reminding us of grandfatherly chats, squeaky slippers, soft wine, and a knowledge gained only through experience. They have been there in rickety, skeletal bleachers in...
By John Schulian The Stacks Reader April 4, 2018 There were unknowns piled atop unknowns when I began planning to give up my newspaper sports column and light out for Hollywood. Foremost among them was whether Steven Bochco would answer the letter I sent him. He was...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader A Siegel Film, Don Siegel’s account of his life as a film director is an entertaining and instructive guide to making movies. I especially like the section about Siegel’s experience working with Walter Matthau on Charley Varrick. For a...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader August 19, 2017 My mother is Belgian and throughout my childhood we entertained relatives when they came through New York. Not just my grandparents, my aunts and uncle, but cousins, friends, and friends of friends. My father was a...
By W. C. Heinz The Saturday Evening Post January 10, 1959 In five hours Gordie Howe would play hockey with the Detroit Red Wings against the New York Rangers. Now it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and he was sitting at the kitchen table in his new home in a residential...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter August 14, 2014 Today marks the publication of the Library of America’s latest sports anthology—-Football: Great Writing about the National Sport. It’s edited by our old chum John Schulian. Alex Belth: When you read boxing or baseball...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter April 30, 2012 Robert Ward is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He recently published Renegades, a collection of his magazine work from the 1970s and was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule for a chat. Alex...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter April 30, 2013 “The truest thing in the world was that you showed who you were writing a column. He said that at his lectures, and they always took that to mean politics or how you feel about the death penalty. Which had nothing to do with...
