By Skip Bayless The Chicago Tribune April 2, 1998 Forgive me, but I prefer to remember the old Harry. The St. Louis Harry. The Harry who was heard but rarely seen. The Hall of Fame Harry who described baseball as sharply and dominantly as Bob Gibson pitched. The Harry...
By Red Smith The New York Herald Tribune October 4, 1951 Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible...
By Todd Drew Bronx Banter November 7, 2008 The memories will not stop. Sometimes they come in the middle of the night and you have to walk. So you head down five flights to Walton Avenue. You pass the spot on East 157th Street where a batboy once found Satchel Paige...
By Wendell Smith Chicago’s American April 5, 1961 SARASOTA, Fla.—Meet the loneliest people in Sarasota, Fla.—Mr. and Mrs. Edward Wachtel. They are the proprietors of the DeSoto motel, the eight-unit establishment where the Negro members of the White Sox have been...
By Red Smith The New York Times October 19, 1968 The four-hundred-meter race was over and in the catacombs of Estadio Olimpico Doug Roby, president of the United States Olympic Committee, was telling newspapermen that he had warned America’s runners against making any...
By Red Smith The New York Times June 11, 1973 The thing to remember is that the horse that finished last had broken the Kentucky Derby record. If there were no colt named Secretariat, then Sham would have gone into the Belmont Stakes Saturday honored as the finest...
By Pete Dexter Esquire May 1985 All right, let’s start with the head. Say check-out time is 1:00 and everybody who reads this magazine is stuck in a room at a Holiday Inn somewhere in Louisiana because nobody can figure out how to unlock the security chain, and...
By Red Smith The New York Times October 19, 1977 It had to happen this way. It had been predestined since November 29, 1976, when Reginald Martinez Jackson sat down on a gilded chair in New York’s Americana Hotel and wrote his name on a Yankee contract. That day he...
By Red Smith The New York Herald Tribune October 27, 1951 [This column is collected in American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith] Joe Louis lay on his stomach on a rubbing table with his right ear pillowed on a folded towel, his left hand in a bucket of ice on the...
By Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin The Village Voice January 17, 1989 NEWS ITEM: Young dies in September ’87 When I first arrived here, I took one look at the place and I felt… well, let down. I figured Heaven should be a playground filled with stickball-playing kids...
By Tom Archdeacon The Miami News January 22, 1979 Darrell Smith sat there and listened quietly. What he heard hurt him, but he didn’t speak. He looked down at the floor. He fidgeted and fumbled with a small Instamatic camera he had brought to the game. Six feet away,...
By Richard Ben Cramer The Baltimore Sun October 17, 1977 I admit it. I’m a Yankee fan, always have been. It wasn’t my fault, really…you see, my grandfather… Well, enough apologies. The fact is I’m glad the Yankees are back and if you had any sense, you would be too....
