When Marvin Gaye walked into Berry Gordy’s office and said he would never sing about love again. Gordy laughed. Then the world changed. It was 1970 and a man walked into the most powerful office in black music and said something that nobody in that building had ever said before. He was 31 years old….
There is a sentence that Marvin Gaye said out loud in front of witnesses the first time he saw Janis Hunter. He said it to the person standing next to him. He said it the way people say things they know are true before they have finished deciding whether they want them to be true….
There is a room in Detroit in 1970 that most people have never heard about. It is not a famous room. It is not a room that appears in the official histories or the critical biographies or the carefully curated accounts of how one of the greatest albums in the history of American music came…
There is a night in 1972 that almost nobody knows about. It did not happen on a stage or in a recording studio or in any of the public spaces where the history of popular music is usually made. It happened in a private room in a city where both men happened to be at…
In 1987, Lawrence Taylor published a book, The NFL Read It, and went completely silent. Because on page after page, Taylor described exactly how he beat their drug tests for years. In his own words, hidden on his body every single time he was tested was a teammate’s clean sample. He beat every test the…
January 25th, 1986. A hotel meeting room in New Orleans just hours before Super Bowl 20. Buddy Ryan’s voice cracked. His players stared back, jaws tight, fists clenched. In seconds, a steel film projector would be lying in pieces on the floor. Kicked there by one of the most feared defensive linemen in football. Next,…
Steve Sarkeesian and company are pushing to bring another top five recruiting class to Austin next year. Texas has had its hands in myriad high-profile recruitments this cycle, and it has oftentimes come out with a commitment. That’s been especially true this summer. The Longhorns landed 11 commitments in June, eight of which were of…
Deion Sanders is trying to restart the party. After a brutal five-game losing streak to close out the Big 12 season and the 16th time in 18 years that Colorado failed to win more than three conference games, Coach Prime is all but starting over. And there’s something to that. If your team isn’t good…
Everyone who ever played for Vince Lombardi remembers the same thing first. The sound of his voice before they remember anything he actually said. Grown men, professional athletes, hit by 300-lb linemen without flinching, have talked for decades about the specific terror of hearing him coming down the hallway. He ran practices like punishment. He…
John Wayne was in the middle of filming the most important scene of his career when a production assistant handed him a letter. He read it once. Then he stood up, walked off the set, and never came back that day. What happened next left 3,000 crew members changed forever. It was June 3rd, 1965…
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