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...
By Paul Hemphill From The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music 1970 If You Don’t Clean Your Tab in 1968, Your Credit Is No Damn Good in 1969. Thank You. Tootsie. —Notice Behind the Bar At Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Nashville,...
By Pat Jordan TV Guide (original draft) 1989 Studio Executive to Director of Stick: “You’ll have to re-shoot some scenes.” Director to Executive: “I don’t have to re-shoot any thing. I’m Burt Reynolds.” Executive to Director: “You used to be Burt...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter March 21, 2003 I’ve have been working on a proposal to write a biography on Curt Flood for a Young Adult audience. Needless to say, I’m pretty jacked up about it. And who better to talk about Curt Flood than Marvin Miller, now 86, the former...
By Paul Solotaroff The Village Voice October 29, 1991 Half the world was in mortal terror of him. He had a sixty-inch chest, twenty-three-inch arms, and when the Anadrol and Bolasterone backed up in his bloodstream, his eyes went as red as the laser scope on an Uzi....
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...
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...
By Peter Richmond GQ October 1992 Nighttime in Los Angeles, on a quiet street off Melrose Avenue. An otherwise normal evening is marked by an oddly whimsical celestial disturbance: Baseballs are falling out of the sky. They are coming from the roof of a gray apartment...
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...
By George Plimpton From Paper Lion 1966 Jack Benny used to say that when he stood on the stage in white tie and tails for his violin concerts and raised his bow to begin his routine—scraping through “Love in Bloom”—he felt like a great violinist. He reasoned that, if...
By John Schulian Deadspin August 1, 2014 Dizzy Dean was baseball’s one-man free speech movement. There were big names with untamed mouths before him, of course, Babe Ruth being the obvious example, but the Babe was only too happy to take time out for the occasional...
By Lawrence Wright New Times June 12, 1978 … The sun was a golden globe, half-hidden, and as we drove along it appeared to be some giant golden elephant running along the horizon and I felt so good I remembered something Johnny Sain used to talk about. He used to say...
