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 Jennifer Briggs The Dallas Observer June 4, 1992 I was 22 years old and the first woman ever to cover sports for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Up until then, my assignments had been small-time: high school games and features on father-daughter doubles teams and...
By Bob Greene Chicago Sun-Times 1972* Sometimes, late in the night, during those hours when you know there is no reason to stay out and yet something keeps you from heading for home and sleep, you will see him at the end of the bar. Always he will be alone, with his...
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...
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...
By Scott Raab GQ July 1997 If you grew up in Cleveland, rooting ten, twenty, thirty years for what was then the most drab and futile team in baseball, you loathed Pete Rose for at least three reasons. You despised him for his skill and for his frenzy to win. You...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter July 28, 2003 The author of Moneyball was in Boston to throw out the first pitch last Friday night. (David Halberstam, eat your heart out.) A week earlier, Michael Lewis was in New York, putting the finishing touches on the press tour for...
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the Forties, won its name many years ago and continued to deserve it until about the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed.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 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 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...
