L.T. and the Home Team

By John Ed Bradley Esquire December 1985 Out one night last summer in Williamsburg, Virginia—a night that started warm and breezy but quickly turned as hot and rank as old meat—D’Fellas quit talking about local trim for a minute and somebody started on God. Eric...

How Hollywood Ruined Our Best Football Novel

By John Schulian The Chicago Daily News 1977 Long before he established himself as the Ring Lardner of the Pepsi generation, Dan Jenkins wrote about sports for the blighted Fort Worth Press. He had to rise at 4 every morning to put out the paper’s first edition, and...

Willie Morris And The Courting of Marcus Dupree

By Allen Barra Inside Sports May 1985 It’s hard to think back on this story now without sadness. You hear so often about some running back who could have been the greatest. Well, Marcus really was the greatest, or at least he could have been. I’ve never seen...

Jim Brown

By Diane K. Shah Sport December 1986 It is a hot Los Angeles afternoon, sun beating down on the city, burning through the blanket of thick, brown smog lying on top of the basin. But here on Sunset Plaza Drive where Jim Brown’s house sits at the highest point of this...

Herschel Walker Doesn’t Tap Out

By Steve Oney Playboy December 2011 On a hot summer afternoon, Herschel Walker, wearing a Best Damn Sports Show T-shirt and Clinch board shorts, strides into the 2,500-square-foot main room of the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, Calif. At 6-foot-1 and 219...

Don Shula, In Perspective

By Pete Dexter Esquire September 1983 The old man was hurt at Pearl Harbor and moved to Florida to mend after they processed him out of the service. He’s been there, and in his wheelchair, ever since. Forty-two years. He lives in Miramar now, just across the line in...

The Snake at 34

By Pete Axthelm Inside Sports September 1980 Yes, I am a pirate, Two hundred years too late. The cannon’s don’t thunder, There’s nothing to plunder… Jimmy Buffett wrote the song, A Pirate Looks at Forty, in honor of a familiar character around the treasure-dreaming...

Smith Hates For it to End Like This

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,...

Off-Broadway Joe

By Tony Kornheiser Inside Sports July 1981 He came straight from Florida, and in black tie the combination of the tan and the tux glistened in the heat of the night. His eyes were bright, gorgeous green, and the shadings of brown in his hair were caught, then polished...