By Pete Dexter Inside Sports May 1981 The face suggests more than 21 fights, but that’s how many there have been. Counting the two as an amateur. There is a scar over the left eye, a missing tooth. The nose is flat and soft, without cartilage. Apart from that, it’s a...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter February 23, 2012 The Knicks are in Miami tonight to play the Heat. What better time to hear from Scott Raab, the Esquire writer and author of The Whore of Akron: One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James. The Whore of Akron is a funny,...
By Jack Murphy The New Yorker 1961 Archibald Lee Moore, the light-heavyweight boxing champion of the world, is 44 years of age by his own account and 47 by his mother’s. She says that he was born on December 13, 1913, in Benoit, Mississippi, but he insists that the...
By Donald Hall Sport December 1986 Last year the City of Boston erected a statue of Red Auerbach in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace near the effigy of James Michael Curley, another shrewd benefactor of Boston who once was reelected mayor while serving a term in jail. In...
By Davis Miller The Louisville Courier-Journal 1989 I’d been waiting for years. When it finally happened, it wasn’t what I’d expected. But he’s been fooling many of us for most of our lives. For six months, several of his friends had been trying to connect me with him...
By Joe Flaherty The Village Voice August 26, 1972 When Willie Mays returned to New York, many saw it—may God forgive them—as a trade to be debated on the merits of statistics. Could the forty-one-year-old center fielder with ascending temperament and waning batting...
By George Kimball From Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories 2010 There are things you learned about the old Yankee Stadium once it became your place of work that never would have occurred to you as a kid going to watch a game there. Making your way from the visiting to the...
By Ivan Solotaroff Esquire November 1992 Bald, bone-white, wearing baggy sweats and clunky sneakers, Jerry “Tark the Shark” Tarkanian looks like a cross between Mr. Magoo and Yertle the Turtle as he paces the length of the hardwood floor of the Blossom Athletic Center...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter August 20, 2003 Jane Leavy, author of last year’s smash hit, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, is on a roll. Not only is Koufax due out in paperback this September, but Perennial (a division of HarperCollins) has issued a paperback edition of...
By Scott Raab GQ October 1992 Cleveland State University hired Kevin Mackey to coach men’s basketball in 1983, the summer I graduated. No one gave a shit, me least of all. The team had gone 8-and-20, and Mackey was some no-name Boston College assistant. Besides, like...
By Hank Waddles Bronx Banter September 25, 2009 You probably don’t know Arnold Hano. How could you? You live in a world of bullet points and exclamation points, a place where sportswriters aspire either to the pomposity of ESPN’s “Sports Reporters” or to the cacophony...
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...
