By Alex Belth Bronx Banter May 13, 2010 Every so often, you run into a kindred spirit, a guy you aren’t envious of, just proud to know. Todd Drew was like that, and so is Josh Wilker (pictured above, on the left with his brother Ian). When I first read Josh’s work at...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter August 28, 2012 Sports on Earth debuted yesterday and featured a Q&A I did with W.K. Stratton, author of a fine new biography of Floyd Patterson. Stratton is the author of four other books, including Dreaming Sam Peckinpah. He also...
By John Lardner Newsweek 1949 The St. Louis Browns have hired a professional psychologist for the spring training season to currycomb their inferiority complex. The Boston Red Sox, on the other hand, have chosen a simpler way of treating their own psychological...
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 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 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...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter December 26, 2013 Our pal Peter Richmond’s new book is out: Phil Jackson: Lord of the Rings. I recently had the chance to catch up with him and chat about Phil Jackson and the craft of writing a biography. Dig in to this holiday Banter...
By Larry Merchant From Ringside Seat at the Circus 1976 Paul Simon, the Simon of Simon and Garfunkel, was invited to Yankee Stadium yesterday to throw out the first ball, to see a ballgame, to revisit his childhood fantasy land, to show the youth of America that...
