By William Nack From Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories 2000 On a balmy afternoon in February, 1999, as old Yankee Stadium was getting her face lifted and nails polished for the spring opener, I visited the grand old yard to peer into the nooks and corners of her...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter April 30, 2012 Robert Ward is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He recently published Renegades, a collection of his magazine work from the 1970s and was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule for a chat. Alex...
By Tony Kornheiser The New York Times Magazine April 9, 1978 The old man was rigid. Dinner was at 5:45 each evening, and it was “Please, sir” and “Thank you, sir” and “May I be excused, sir?” He was a perfectionist. He was an intercollegiate hurdles champion, and he...
By Harry Stein Esquire July 1977 “I’d rather hit than have sex,” Reggie Jackson offered up to the man from Time who was laboring on a cover story. “God, do I love to hit that little round sum-bitch out of the park and make ’em say, ‘Wow!’” Sports Illustrated’s guy...
By Alex Belth SI.com December 22, 2008 It was almost one o’clock in the morning but the scoreboard clock was frozen at 12:21. The last game at Yankee Stadium was over, and nobody was in a rush to leave. Sinatra had finally stopped singing “New York, New York,” and...
By Michael Paterniti Esquire September 1999 I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his...
By Loren Feldman GQ February 1990 First, he pointed the gun at his own head. “What? In front of your kids?” she said. Then, he pointed it at her head. “You’re not going to do that,” she said. The first shot went through her neck. She tried to run, but he pursued her...
By Robert Ward Sport June 1977 Oh, golden, yellow light shimmering on Reggie Jackson’s chest! Yes, that’s he, the latest member of the American League Champion New York Yankees, and he is standing by his locker, bare-chested, million-dollar sweat dripping from his...
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 Red Smith The New York Times October 19, 1977 It had to happen this way. It had been predestined since November 29, 1976, when Reginald Martinez Jackson sat down on a gilded chair in New York’s Americana Hotel and wrote his name on a Yankee contract. That day he...
By John Eskow New Times October 30, 1978 The face is a harbormaster’s face, or a potato farmer’s, or a lobsterman’s: sharp, prominent nose, articulate features, eyes meant for pinpointing danger. At 39, the body is aching but supple. As he enters the sepulchral...
By Jared Haynes Writing on the Edge Fall 1992 Roger Angell has been a fiction editor for The New Yorker since 1956 and has contributed to the magazine for close to fifty years. He is best known for his pieces on baseball, written for the magazine’s “The Sporting...
