Sublime

By far the best account of Benny Leonard, both of his mystique and of his fighting style, I discovered, is by Budd Schulberg in one of his collections of boxing pieces. Schulberg, to my mind, may be the most underrated of all American authors, the author of the best firsthand account of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel The Disenchanted, and the

doggedness

On a nearby television, I watched Cleveland sports fans burn the jersey of some basketball player, a self-proclaimed messiah who’d left because winning was hard there and it’d be easier in Florida.

At Oakland, Al Davis introduced me (and anyone else on his staff who cared to pay attention) to an approach to preparation and execution unlike anything I’d ever seen. He was obsessed with achieving superior organizational performance and professionalism. His devotion to quality became Oakland’s official team motto: “Commitment to Excellence.” And

A mind-numbing percentage of pro athletes are obsessed with God. According to an episode of Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports on HBO, some studies suggest that as many as 40 percent of NFL players consider themselves “born again.” This trend continues to baffle me, especially since it seems like an equal number of pro football players spend the entire

Dischner is the only Paradise City member who naturally looks like a GNR doppelgänger. He’s also the guy who makes the trains run on time; he handles the money, coordinates the schedules, and generally keeps his bandmates from killing each other. All of these guys are friendly, but Dischner is the most relentlessly nice. He’s also mind-blowingly

Hyatt House. Their directive to Intel’s management corps was simple and clear: “We’re going to win in 16-bit microprocessors. We’re committed to this.” Andy told us what