What Might Have Been

By Ron Rapoport From The Immortal Bobby: Bobby Jones and the Golden Age of Golf 2005   Sometime after Augusta National, the home of the Masters, became one of the most famous golf courses in the world, it was suggested that a statue of its founder, Bobby Jones,...

Law and Order at Night

By Dan Wakefield From Between the Lines 1966 Beneath the gold draperies that canopy the long, high-ceilinged stage of the Montgomery, Alabama, City Hall sat the officers of the local White Citizens Council and their honored guests—the top officials of the city,...

Justice in Summer

By Dan Wakefield The Nation October, 1955 The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it. Citizens who drink from the “Whites Only” fountain in the...

Jimmy the Greek: The Living Dead

By Peter Richmond The National Sports Daily April 13, 1990 His words break the silence of a breakfast conversation that has wound down to nothing. They are as soft and insubstantial as rust flaking away, so soft that at first you think you might have heard him wrong,...

How Pryor Put Cosby Behind Him

By Scott Saul From Becoming Richard Pryor 2014 When Richard Pryor first came on the national scene in the mid ’60s, he was a comic who consciously followed the blueprint established by Bill Cosby. Never mind that Pryor, even when he was doing a clean act, lacked...

Little Big Mouth: The Unfunny Comedy of Andrew Dice Clay

By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice 1990 A hundred or so surprisingly subdued leather boys and their women are guzzling Budweiser and Bud Lights on a bottlenecked New Jersey Transit bus to the sold-out, 21,000-seat Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands, headed to...

Pride and Prejudice

By David Maraniss From Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero 2006 There was something about Clemente that surpassed statistics, then and always. Some baseball mavens love the sport precisely because of its numbers. They can take the mathematics of a...

The Methods and Madness of Hubie Brown

By Steve Oney The Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine December 9, 1979 From a vantage point high in some structural-steel arena in a city like Philadelphia or New York or, for that matter, Atlanta, Hubie Brown, the coach of the Atlanta Hawks, appears to be a...

The Lindbergh Legends

By John Lardner From The Aspirin Age 1949 In May 1927, a slim, comely man of twenty-five years flew an airplane from New York to Paris all by himself, without stopping. His performance was instantly recognized as the climactic stunt of a time of marvelous stunts, of...

The Love Ethic on 125th Street

By Joe Flaherty The Village Voice April 11, 1968 In times of national tragedy the barometer of the mood of the people can best be researched in saloons and cathedrals. Being more comfortable in the former, Friday afternoon I stopped into a pub in the Wall Street area....

Bards of the Bayou

By John Ed Bradley GQ June 1991 Tipitina’s in the warm blue fog, squatting beneath a crescent moon so sharp and clean you could shave a wild hog with it. Art Neville enters the famous New Orleans honky-tonk wearing a hipster’s suit and studded leather boots, his wife,...

The Mark of Excellence

By John Schulian Inside Sports March 1981 It was some big boat, all right—a ’79 Lincoln Continental, long as a city block, blue with a white top and enough chrome to make it look like a rolling mirror. When it steamed out of Chicago’s West Side last year, there wasn’t...