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American Treasure
Via NPR, Alan Lomax’s massive archive goes on line....
A Collection Of Your Stories About Meeting Muhammad Ali
On Friday, we republished "My Dinner with Ali," Davis Miller's great story from 1989 about his life-affirming encounter with Muhammad Ali. Almost immediately, the comments section began filling up with readers' own accounts of meeting Ali. You can find a few of those through the links below, but you...
My Dinner With Ali
Adapted from the original, which was published in 1989 in the Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine. Footnotes from the author (as told to Tommy Craggs) are included throughout the story, and a postscript from Glenn Stout, editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Sports Writing series, follows. The ...
From The Sports Guy Vault: Bill Simmons Says Tear Down Fenway Park
Let's return to the Bill Simmons Archive, a collection of Boston Sports Guy columns salvaged from the defunct AOL Digital Cities. In honor of Red Sox opening day, let's look at an old column calling for the demolition of Fenway Park—and the construction of something totally new and different in its ...
From The Sports Guy Vault: Bill Simmons Ranks The Worst Fans In Sports
Back we go into the Bill Simmons archive, where we rescue Simmons's AOL Digital Cities work from the internet aether. Today's long-lost column: "The 20 Most Annoying Sports Fans Alive," originally published June 4, 1999....
All The Pop Culture References From Bill Simmons's Earliest Known Column
We're diving back into the Bill Simmons archive, a previously undiscovered treasure trove of Sports Guy material from AOL Digital Cities. Today's is a special one, as it takes us more than two decades back in the Simmons oeuvre. It was originally written in the fall of 1989, when Simmons was a sopho...
Bill Simmons's Very First Visit To ESPN
We've been dipping into the Bill Simmons archive, a salvaged cache of the Sports Guy's old columns from AOL Digital Cities, none of which survives online. Today's jaunt down memory lane is a field trip Simmons took to Bristol in 1997, under the auspices of his friend Gus Ramsey, a SportsCenter produ...
Here's The AOL Column That Got Bill Simmons Hired By ESPN, In Which He Calls The ESPYs A "TV Holocaust"
ESPN's initial courtship of Bill Simmons has the air of an urban legend. Simmons wrote a column excoriating the bloated and self-congratulatory ESPY Awards, and that column was rapidly forwarded around Bristol, putting the Boston Sports Guy on ESPN's radar. Much like Aeschylus's lost plays, the ESPY...
Tennis Players Bill Simmons Would Do: Another Classic From The Secret Sports Guy Vault
It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. After seeing last week's newly unearthed column from Simmons's AOL Digital City days, a reader sent along another Boston Sports Guy entry rescued from the dustbin of history. If you've got any old Simm...
Deadspin Archives: Brent Musburger Offers Some Troubling News About Joe Paterno
In October 2008, before most of the world knew anything about Jerry Sandusky, Brent Musburger was a guest on the Dan Patrick Show and offered a now seemingly prophetic glimpse into what kept Joe Paterno going. Originally published October 15, 2008....
The Sports Guy Before ESPN: A 2000 Bill Simmons Column Is Unearthed
It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. The formative years of one of the country's most successful sports writers are lost forever, all because AOL Digital City preserved nothing. But even then the "Boston Sports Guy" had fans devoted enoug...
The Dead Wrestler Of The Week Archive
Brian "Crush" Adams (1964-2007): He played so many archetypes of '90s wrestling mythology that he became legendary at none, moving from persona to persona without fully leaving the last behind. No mention of his previous lives was made. He was a man without a history, unstuck in time. READ »...