By Alex Belth Bronx Banter December 15, 2008 Looking for that ideal last-minute holiday gift for the sports fan in your life? Look no further than The Best American Sportswriting of 2008, edited by Bill Nack, who is one of the finest sportswriters we have. Nack is a...
By John Schulian MSNBC 2001 Not a holiday season arrives that I don’t think of a gray, clammy day long ago on Baltimore’s waterfront and a lost soul who told me about the woman who had given him his only gift in years: a Christmas card. It was just the sort of story I...
By Stephen Rodrick The New York Times Magazine June 1, 2003 Dennis Rodman, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, lounges in a chair on the patio of his oceanfront home in Newport Beach, Calif. After multiple hues and shades, Rodman’s hair is back to its...
By Elizabeth Kaye The Los Angeles Times Magazine October 31, 2004 The year before Kobe’s troubles began, I had told him I thought he would love ballet because it’s as outrageously athletic and graceful and dynamic as he aspires to be. He went to see The Nutcracker and...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter July 15, 2009 Glenn Stout, a longtime favorite here at Bronx Banter, is most famous around these parts for his historical writing, particularly Yankees Century and Red Sox Century. Stout also serves as the series editor for The Best American...
By Rich Cohen Harper’s August 2001 When the Chicago Cubs last won a World Series, the automobile was still a new and untrusted invention and the electric light was not yet twenty years old. In the years since the fifth game of that series, most of the European...
By John Schulian Sports Illustrated September 5, 2005 There were some hard miles on that bus, and harder ones on the man behind the wheel. His name was Oscar Charleston, which probably means nothing to you, as wrong as that is. He was managing the Philadelphia Stars...
By Pat Jordan AARP November/December 2006 My father died in the spring of 2005, a year-and-a-half after my mother died, and a week after he visited my wife and me in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 95. She was 97. My niece was with my father when he died in a...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter May 13, 2009 Our old pal Allen Barra sat down with me recently to talk about his new book, Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee. Alex Belth: You make the argument that Yogi was a better catcher than Johnny Bench. How close was Roy Campanella to Yogi...
By John Schulian MSNBC December 3, 2001 The train to glory left without James Crumley, who seems to have been too busy examining life’s gnarly side to bother catching it. There are no best-sellers for him, no money-bloated deals with Hollywood—just hard-boiled novels...
By Alex Belth SI.com December 22, 2008 It was almost one o’clock in the morning but the scoreboard clock was frozen at 12:21. The last game at Yankee Stadium was over, and nobody was in a rush to leave. Sinatra had finally stopped singing “New York, New York,” and...
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...
