By John Lardner From White Hopes and Other Tigers 1951 Hell’s Kitchen, the region west of Eighth Avenue around the Forties, won its name many years ago and continued to deserve it until about the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Things are different there...
By Alex Belth Introduction from Southwest Passage 2013 When he went off to cover the war in the Pacific in January 1943, John Lardner was twenty-nine years old and, thanks to his weekly column in Newsweek, already a major figure in sportswriting. Nothing at Madison...
By Westbrook Pegler Chicago Tribune October 2, 1932 There, in the third ball game of the World Series, at the Cubs’ ball yard on the north side yesterday, the people who had the luck to be present saw the supreme performance of the greatest artist the profession of...
By Wilfred Santiago From 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente 2001 Before Game 7 of the 1971 World Series, Roberto Clemente told Roger Angell, “I want everybody in the world to know that this is the way I play all the time. All season, every season. I gave everything I...
By Paul Slansky New Times January 1978 Martin Mull’s manager has forgotten to make a reservation, so we stand in the entrance to the Universal commissary waiting for an empty table while stars like Lily Tomlin and Sly Stallone march past us to immediate seating. “I...
By Ross Wetzsteon New York Magazine March 14, 1988 Flying. He’d wanted to fly since he was 16. Sitting at his desk in high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, he fantasized that it was a P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre jet. He didn’t want to be a pilot, he wanted to be a...
By Nik Cohn Inside Sports February 1981 In Atlantic City, Willie Mays played an elderly game, serving as designated greeter at Bally’s Park Place Hotel. After the fracas of his hiring, when Bowie Kuhn barred him from baseball, he settled into a gentle routine of...
By Paul Hemphill From The Good Old Boys 1974 ICC is a-checkin on down the line, Well, I’m a little overweight And my log book’s way behind; Nothin’ bothers me tonight, I can dodge all the scales all right; Six days on the road And I’m a-gonna make it home...
By Edwin Shrake Harper’s February 1970 For about five hours I had been drinking Scotch whiskey and arguing with a rather nice, sometimes funny old fellow named Arch, who was so offended by my moderately long hair that he had demanded to know if I weren’t actually,...
By E. Jean Carroll Esquire April 1992 Thus spoke the whole of womankind. —Honoré de Balzac “I mean, this guy, I walked in his hotel room one day, and he had on a towel…. Am I lying?” says Miss Boyd. “This man, his body. He played for the Bulls. Oh! This man had...
By Pat Jordan GQ April 1988 He was just another bum bleeding to death in an alleyway at four o’clock in the morning. He lay motionless on the concrete, as if sleeping, his tangled shoulder-length hair ringed by a halo of blood. He lay there peacefully for a while, in...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Ray Robinson died last November at the age of 96. He was born and raised in New York, spent pretty much his whole life here and he died here. Ray wrote about sports and worked as an editor for magazines like Pageant, Good Housekeeping...
