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 November 1, 2013 Rich Cohen’s new book, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, is a keeper. I’ve been a fan of Cohen’s writing ever since my pal Steinski hipped me to Tough Jews. A few weeks ago I talked to Rich...
By Richard Price Playboy October 1979 Because I grew up in a multiethnic environment in New York City, the South has always conjured up some bad news reactions on word-association tests for me: Klan, lynch, redneck, moonshine, speed-trap towns and death … lots...
By Paul Hemphill Sport January 1972 “A week never passes that the Alumni Office fails to receive news highlighting the good works of former football players. So many of them reflect credit on our University.” —University of Tennessee Football Guide, 1970 What...
By Paul Solotaroff The National Sports Daily April 1991 In the candlelit quiet of Jim Brown’s living room, the unkillable Tee Rogers stands up and tells the hardboys that he is tired of all the death. Tee Rogers, the granddaddy of L.A. gangsters, whose resume reads,...
By Pete Dexter Inside Sports October 1981 At three in the morning, coming east across the Bay Bridge in a limousine the size of a cattle truck, a quiet falls over the back seat. It is the last day before John Matuszak goes to Santa Rosa for training camp. More to the...
By George Plimpton From Paper Lion 1966 Jack Benny used to say that when he stood on the stage in white tie and tails for his violin concerts and raised his bow to begin his routine—scraping through “Love in Bloom”—he felt like a great violinist. He reasoned that, if...
By Peter Richmond GQ May 2001 One by one, day by day, they’d glide to the witness stand, this procession of improbable women, a spangled harem of them, drifting into the courtroom and out again, leaving the scent of their perfume and the shadow of their glitter and...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter April 24, 2012 Mark Kram Jr. is one of the finest practitioners we have of long-form newspaper journalism, better known as the bonus or takeout piece. He has been with the Philadelphia Daily News since 1987 and his work has appeared in The...
By John Ed Bradley From It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium 2007 You should’ve seen my father’s arms. He didn’t lift weights or do push-ups or exercise them in any way, and yet they were packed tight with muscle. When I was a boy and he lifted his highball in the evening...
By David Maraniss From Run to Daylight! Foreword to the 2014 edition For two summers while I was researching the biography When Pride Still Mattered, I lived in New York. Day after day I would venture out to Sheepshead Bay, where Vince Lombardi was born and reared; or...
By Vince Lombardi with W.C. Heinz From Run to Daylight! 1964 3:15 A.M. I have been asleep for three hours and, suddenly, I am awake. I am wide awake, and that’s the trouble with this game. Just twelve hours ago I walked off that field, and we had beaten the Bears...
