The Write Stuff

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader A couple of our pals have new stellar new book anthologies out and both are well worth your time. From the intrepid Wright Thompson, ESPN’s maestro of longform, comes his first anthology, The Cost Of These Dreams: Sports Stories and...

The Stacks Chat: Alex Wolff

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader April 2018 The Library of America’s newest sports anthology, Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game, is out and deserves a place on the shelf of any self-respecting hoops fan. We recently sat down with the book’s editor,...

Requiem For A Forgotten Globetrotter

By Peter Goldman Sport November 1977 “You get what your hand called for.” —The Sayings of Leon Hillard Somebody showed me in the papers a while ago where Leon got what his hand didn’t call for. The headline jumped out at me first—EX-GLOBETROTTER IS KILLED BY WIFE—and...

The Stacks Chat: Gregg Sutter

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader September 16, 2014 Hard to imagine having a cooler job than the one Gregg Sutter had for more than 30 years, when he served as the late Elmore Leonard’s researcher. Sutter is the editor of the Library of America’s Elmore Leonard...

No Pain, No Game

By Mark Kram Esquire January 1992 Observe, please, the human skeleton, 208 bones perfectly wrought and arranged; the feet built on blocks, the shinbones like a Doric column. Imagine an engineer being told to come up with the vertebral column from scratch. After years,...

Work Horse on Ice

By W. C. Heinz The Saturday Evening Post January 10, 1959 In five hours Gordie Howe would play hockey with the Detroit Red Wings against the New York Rangers. Now it was 3:30 in the afternoon, and he was sitting at the kitchen table in his new home in a residential...

Yesterday’s Hero

By Paul Hemphill Sport January 1972 “A week never passes that the Alumni Office fails to receive news highlighting the good works of former football players. So many of them reflect credit on our University.” —University of Tennessee Football Guide, 1970   What...

Tyrus

By Ring Lardner The American Magazine June 1915 Sit down here a while, kid, and I’ll give you the dope on this guy. You say you didn’t see him do nothin’ wonderful? But you only seen him in one serious. Wait till you been in the league more’n a week or two before you...

How One Of America’s Greatest Sportswriters Disappeared

By John Schulian Deadspin March 11, 2013 It was almost endearing how an ink-smudged, deadline-addicted newspaper editor of yore would squint through the smoke from his cigarette and ask a bright young man why the hell he wanted to write sports. An editor like that was...

Dispatch From Normandy

By Ernie Pyle Scripps-Howard Wire Service July 13, 1944 IN NORMANDY—(by wireless)—Lieut. Orion Shockley came over with a map and explained to us just what his company was going to do. There was a German strong point of pillboxes and machine-gun nests about half a mile...

George Kimball: The Professional

By John Schulian Bronx Banter July 8, 2011 George Kimball was blessed with the kind of voluble charm you find in an Irish bar, and, brother, let me tell you he’d been in a few. No amount of drink, however, could rein in his galloping intelligence. It was as pure a...