Sober Virgins of the ’80s

By Eve Babitz Smart Fall 1988 < Not that I like the eighties, but the sixties, if you ask me, weren’t that great, either. I mean, in the fifties, for men to get girls into bed, they had to be good lovers, to persist, to be sensual and seductive and inevitable 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...

Doctor One and Only

By Mark Jacobson Esquire April 1985 I went for a ride through downtown Philadelphia with Julius Erving in his Maserati the other day, and with each passing block it became more apparent: Julius cannot drive very well. It wasn’t a question of reckless speed or ignored...

Trouble in Paradise

By Pat Jordan Inside Sports 1980 This is a story about Southern California, and baseball, and sex, and fame, and wealth, and beauty, and the American Dream. It is a story about a famous athlete and his beautiful wife and the life they live in that rarefied atmosphere...

Rocky’s Road

By Joe Flaherty Film Comment August 1982 For sheer emotional impact, the two movies that struck a deep societal chord over the last decade were Death Wish and Rocky. The first is easy to fathom. Charles Bronson (if he’s frightened, we’re not paranoid) cinematically...

Sympathy For the Devil

By Joe Flaherty Inside Sports January 1981 All lives are failures in some degree or another. Somewhere along the line we fudge the pristine youthful dream. Even when we achieve, the compromises we’ve made, the injuries we’ve inflicted sully the prize. But most of us...

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...

The Duke of Deception

By Pat Jordan Southern Magazine October 1987 “We had to get David out of the Klan. He was seducing all the wives.” —Ku Klux Klan member, July 1986  It was a stroke of genius. The Presidential candidate had been denied a platform to announce his candidacy by two...

Pistol Pete’s Last Shot

By David Halberstam Inside Sports April 1980 They are slow this day at the baggage counter at the Seattle airport, and the players—up too early for the flight after a game the night before, anxious to get on with it, to get to the hotel so they can practice and then...

Rear Window

By Michael Sragow The Boston Phoenix October 11, 1983 Rear Window is more than one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest comedies of terrors. Set in a Greenwich Village apartment and its adjoining courtyards, this urban variation on the backyard-murder story is a...