Sublime

friend over in Fayette County.”

(A year later Ball would die of a similar ailment on the slopes of Dhaulagiri.)

If one of his teammates was dogging it, he busted that teammate’s balls, and if one of his classmates or professors made a comment that seemed specious or incomplete, he said so. Not because he knew more than they did but because the clash of imperfect ideas was the only way for anyone, including himself, to learn and improve.

Meeting the man himself, it is hard to believe that such a quiet, calm, and serious individual could be responsible for the frantic ‘sheets of sound’ which emanate from his tenor saxophone, or that such [a] sensitive person could think of his uglier wailings on soprano as beautiful.”

of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury,

Dickey writes about how rare this is in his memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: