Jane Leavy
Jane Leavy
Jane Leavyis an award-winning American former sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post. She is the author of the critically acclaimed 1990 comic novel Squeeze Play, which was called "the best novel ever written about baseball" by Entertainment Weekly. She also wrote a best-selling 2005 biography of Sandy Koufax. She lives in Washington, D.C. She is originally from Roslyn, New York, and graduated from Barnard College in 1974 and Columbia University School of Journalism in 1976. She has a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 December 1951
CountryUnited States of America
Some scholars attribute the decline in nicknaming to the evolutionary process that turned folk heroes into entrepreneurs. The truth is: George Herman Ruth, the namely-est guy ever, exhausted our supply of hyperbole.
I wanted it to be big, ... Not about a person or a career but about the time. ... I wanted to use a game of his (to highlight) and there's nothing quite like a perfect game.
At a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, I met David Eisenhower, Ike's grandson, who was promoting his book 'Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,' in which he describes attending the Yankees' 154th game in 1961. The whole family had been following Mantle and Maris chase Babe Ruth's home run record across the country.
Wherever Mantle went in the great metropolis - Danny's Hideaway, the Latin Quarter, the '21' Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, Toots Shor's - his preferred drink was waiting when he walked through the door. Reporters waited at his locker for monosyllabic bons mots. Boys clustered by the players' gate, hoping to touch him.
Mantle didn't want to stick out, but he did. He didn't wish to be treated as special, but he was. He was uncomfortable being the center of attention, but he was the centerfielder for the most famous franchise in sports.
Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.
Trauma fractures comprehension as a pebble shatters a windshield. The wound at the site of impact spreads across the field of vision, obscuring reality and challenging belief.
News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.
Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day - race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters.
I finished what I was writing, pressed 'send' and thought, 'Koufax didn't pitch on Yom Kippur,' ... And I haven't worked on Yom Kippur since.
There is nothing incompatible about laughter and demons, nor about athletic achievement and depression. Mike Flanagan made me laugh, too. But mostly, he made me brave.
When my father realized he was going blind, he took up golf.
For Mantle, the Yankees' locker room was a sanctuary, a safe haven where he was understood, accepted and, when necessary, exonerated.
The world is not kind to whistleblowers - a term of art with particular resonance in football, the most hierarchical and repressive of organized sports, a world of 'systems' and 'programs' and scripted plays, where reading a medical report requires a security clearance, and practice fields are patrolled like Guantanamo Bay.