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 Tony Kornheiser Street & Smith Basketball Annual 1975 Little Looie has his recruiting budget for the year spread out in front of him in little piles—100 subway tokens, 50 bus transfers, and two $5 gift certificates from Orange Julius. He’s on the phone,...
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 Richard Hoffer From A Savage Business 1998 At this time of year, at this time of morning, it was still dark. A small crescent moon hung in the Indiana sky and, beneath it, four helicopters balanced, as if some fantastic throbbing mobile had been constructed for the...
By John Lardner True 1951 One day not long ago, a St. Louis hotel detective tipped off a cop friend of his that there was a fellow in a room on the eighth floor who packed a gun. They decided to do a little further research. They went into the room without knocking,...
By Charles P. Pierce The National Sports Daily May 10, 1990 The press conference was over, and two men from New Castle, Pa., named Robert Retort and Ed Grybowski had been charged with interstate transportation of stolen property, which is a federal felony. In the...
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...
By E. Jean Carroll Outside April/May 1981 There is a horse auction establishment on South MacArthur in Oklahoma City. It is a big white building with a dirt arena inside. Actually, there are two arenas, a large one where the horses are exercised and a smaller one that...
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 James Baldwin Nugget February 1963 We, the writers—a word I am using in its most primitive sense—arrived in Chicago about ten days before the baffling, bruising, an unbelievable two minutes and six seconds at Comiskey Park. We will get to all that later. I know...
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...
