By Michael Paterniti Esquire September 1999 I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his...
By John Marchese Philadelphia November 1991 “So he says—first question—‘Do you believe in sin?’ “Do I believe in sin? I mean, gimme a break.” This is the sound of Pete Dexter dealing with fame. It wasn’t so long ago that Dexter could limp over to 13th and Pine and...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter May 13, 2010 Every so often, you run into a kindred spirit, a guy you aren’t envious of, just proud to know. Todd Drew was like that, and so is Josh Wilker (pictured above, on the left with his brother Ian). When I first read Josh’s work at...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter August 28, 2012 Sports on Earth debuted yesterday and featured a Q&A I did with W.K. Stratton, author of a fine new biography of Floyd Patterson. Stratton is the author of four other books, including Dreaming Sam Peckinpah. He also...
By John Lardner Newsweek 1949 The St. Louis Browns have hired a professional psychologist for the spring training season to currycomb their inferiority complex. The Boston Red Sox, on the other hand, have chosen a simpler way of treating their own psychological...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice 1990 A hundred or so surprisingly subdued leather boys and their women are guzzling Budweiser and Bud Lights on a bottlenecked New Jersey Transit bus to the sold-out, 21,000-seat Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands, headed to...
By Paul Hemphill From The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music 1970 If You Don’t Clean Your Tab in 1968, Your Credit Is No Damn Good in 1969. Thank You. Tootsie. —Notice Behind the Bar At Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville,...
By Pat Jordan TV Guide (original draft) 1989 Studio Executive to Director of Stick: “You’ll have to re-shoot some scenes.” Director to Executive: “I don’t have to re-shoot any thing. I’m Burt Reynolds.” Executive to Director: “You used to be Burt...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter March 21, 2003 I’ve have been working on a proposal to write a biography on Curt Flood for a Young Adult audience. Needless to say, I’m pretty jacked up about it. And who better to talk about Curt Flood than Marvin Miller, now 86, the former...
By Paul Solotaroff The Village Voice October 29, 1991 Half the world was in mortal terror of him. He had a sixty-inch chest, twenty-three-inch arms, and when the Anadrol and Bolasterone backed up in his bloodstream, his eyes went as red as the laser scope on an Uzi....
By David Maraniss From Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero 2006 There was something about Clemente that surpassed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a...
By Steve Oney The Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine December 9, 1979 From a vantage point high in some structural-steel arena in a city like Philadelphia or New York or, for that matter, Atlanta, Hubie Brown, the coach of the Atlanta Hawks, appears to be a...
