Mary Tyler Moore, WJM, and the NFL

Her smile turned the world on, her accessibility proved that love is all around, and her personality made nothing days worthwhile more suddenly than Marcia Brady saying something came up in order to break a date with nice guy Charlie for Doug Simpson, the big man on...

“Ball Four Goes Hollywood”

When Jim Bouton’s book Ball Four hit bookshelves in 1970, it exploded myths, revealed secrets, and offered tales of baseball, theretofore kept protected from the public.  If reporters knew about Mickey Mantle’s alcohol problem, for example, they...

The Yellow Brick Road Goes Through Minneapolis

Take a sweet, innocent, and wide-eyed young woman from the Midwest and put her in an encounter with three men.  One is fairly wooden, showing emotions rarely.  One does not have much in the way of intelligence, common sense, or decorum.  One growls a lot, but is...

Bouton, Baseball, and “Ball Four”

Jim Bouton peeled back the veneer protecting Major League Baseball in his 1970 exposé, Ball Four. It reads like a friend sharing secrets with you over a couple of beers at a baseball game. Bouton, a quasi-phenom pitcher in the early 1960s with the New York Yankees, he...