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According to Frank Deford, the best story to appear in 61 years of Sports Illustrated is a deadline boxing piece from 1975 called ‘Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great,’ by the late Mark Kram.

I recently read the piece for the first time, and I was struck by Kram’s vivid eloquence. Read this brief passage:

“At ringside, even though the arena was air-conditioned, the heat wrapped around the body like a heavy wet rope. By now, President Ferdinand Marcos, a small brown derringer of a man, and Imelda, beautiful and cool as if she were relaxed on a palace balcony taking tea, had been seated.”

And this one:

“Came the sixth, and here it was, that one special moment that you always look for when Joe Frazier is in a fight. Most of his fights have shown this: you can go so far into that desolate and dark place where the heart of Frazier pounds, you can waste his perimeters, you can see his head hanging in the public square, may even believe that you have him, but then suddenly you learn that you have not. Once more the pattern emerged as Frazier loosed all of the fury, all that has made him a brilliant heavyweight. He was in close now, fighting off Ali’s chest, the place where he has to be. His old calling card — that sudden evil, his left hook — was working the head of Ali. Two hooks ripped with slaughterhouse finality at Ali’s jaw, causing Imelda Marcos to look down at her feet, and the President to wince as if a knife had been stuck in his back. Ali’s legs seemed to search for the floor. He was in serious trouble, and he knew that he was in no-man’s-land.”

And finally this one:

“He began to catch Frazier with long right hands, and blood trickled from Frazier’s mouth. Now, Frazier’s face began to lose definition; like lost islands reemerging from the sea, massive bumps rose suddenly around each eye…”

Who writes like this anymore? If you can find brief examples in contemporary journalism (or even in fiction, for that matter), please post them. Or have most of us been convinced that “pretty writing” has no place in the craft?

Subquestion: Do you disagree with Ford? What’s your favorite piece in the history of Sports Illustrated?

Hank Stuever: Looking for something to do in Kansas on a sunny Saturday last spring, I chose darkness, and drove to Hutchinson (pop. 42,000) to take a tour of the subterranean salt mines at the edge of town. At a museum, you buy a ticket and ride a large, clanky freight elevator 650 feet underground, into pitch black.

There was no crowd. I had the vast, dimly lit caverns almost to myself — and what a place. A long series of featureless gray tunnels gave up millions of tons of rock salt over the last century (and still do), excavated over decades by laborious room-and-pillar mining techniques. Down there, it’s always dry and a perfect 67 degrees. You take a little train through the dark and learn a lot about drilling and geology.

The most interesting part of the mines, however, is entirely off limits. Nearly 2 million square feet of tunneled rooms have been profitably repurposed for film and document storage. Hollywood rents some of the space and so does the government. Shelf after shelf of original negatives of movies and old TV shows are kept here below the prairie, safe from almost any apocalyptic or meteorological scenario you can imagine, secure even from the hungry eyes of YouTube and Hulu.

Included in this stash are more than 4,000 episodes of the legendary “Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” His farewell episode aired 20 years ago this month. At some point, the entire archive of tapes — the rights to which Carson fully acquired in one of his many highly publicized contract renegotiations with NBC — came here for eternal rest. Except for the standard clips you see from time to time (one of Joan Embery’s small zoo critters urinating on Johnny’s head; various Carnac the Magnificent routines) and the retrospectiveDVD sets that come and go, the real breadth and achievement of the Carson era is difficult to grasp if you didn’t live through it.

This is fiction, but pretty cool as a storytelling device.

(thanks, Craig)

INTERVIEWER

When did you realize that you had talent?

TALESE

Never. All I have is intense curiosity. I have a great deal of interest in other people and, just as importantly, I have the patience to be around them.

From Paris Review. (thanks, Craig)

Lane DeGregory: TAMPA — He keeps his keyboard in the nurses’ closet on the trauma ward, beside the potty chairs and batteries.

Three days a week, he takes out the Casio and sets it on a cart. He pushes the cart slowly, cradling the keyboard with one arm, through the long hallways of Tampa General Hospital.

His name is William C. Ismer. Everyone calls him Bill or “The Piano Man.” He is 65, a Navy veteran, a retired cop. Most of the nurses know his story.

On this Thursday morning, he rolls his portable piano into the cardiac intensive care unit, turns into the last room on the right.

The room he almost died in, 13 years ago.

“Good morning!” he calls to a pale man in the railed bed. “I told you I’d be back. How you doing?”

Ladies and gentlemen, once again, Charlie LeDuff:

(thanks, Oliver)

Paige Williams: The idea of sororities holds stronger in the Deep South than in the rest of the country, and at my alma mater, Ole Miss, in Oxford, Mississippi, the Greek letters on T-shirts foretold a person’s station in life. I belonged to XΩ, Chi Omega. Our symbol was the owl; our colors were red and gold, or, in the mythical terms we were taught, “cardinal and straw”; and our chapter, Tau, had been at the top of the Greek order since its founding in 1899. The idea of walking around in anything other than the T-shirts, tank tops, earrings, gym shorts, necklaces, and sweatshirts of Chi Omega was so intolerable that rushees had been known to collapse in grief upon being cut, and to immediately pack their bags and go home.

Chi O freshmen were assigned to dorms, sophomores lived in dorms or apartments, and upperclassmen shared bedrooms in our Greek Revival chapter house, where we were surrounded by evidence of our bygone glories. A generation earlier we had produced back-to-back Miss Americas, whose portraits hung in the front stairwell and had become part of the scenery along with the oil paintings and chandeliers. Our housemother, Mrs. Caldwell, a former First Lady of Tupelo, wore silk blouses, pearls, and a cirrus of golden hair, and her mere presence encouraged us to conduct ourselves in a manner befitting our traditions. Chi Os were not to drink beer from cans. Or use profanity. Or dance on elevated surfaces in public. If we smoked, we were not to crassly stand while doing so, but rather sit, preferably with legs crossed. We were not to cultivate wildness or vulgarity in any form.

Instead, Chi Os were expected to run for campus office, participate in extracurricular activities, maintain the highest collective GPA, date nice boys, and perform community service. Plenty of us could secretly out-drink and out-smoke (sitting or standing) the biggest barfly in town, but we took the other expectations seriously, which is how, on a bright, clear Thursday in the spring of 1987, we arrived at the moment that changed everything.

Alex Orlando: LAND O’LAKES — High on its pilings, the wooden A-frame house looked like a ship’s hull jutting over the fence at Paradise Lakes nudist resort.

Zebra skin, dark wood and mirrors covered the inside walls. On a white tiger rug, a 40-something woman with brown hair leaned back on her elbows, nude.

Beside her, Ronald Scharff occupied a multicolored Lay-Z-Boy. His shoulder-length silver hair was combed straight back, his skin 70 years of tan. Even with the distractions — the woman on the rug, the half-empty bottle of Calypso rum on the bar — he still dwelled Wednesday afternoon on his first love: The sweet girl he met 50 years ago in Long Island, who was taken from him by cancer after 41 years of marriage. And who made her way back into his life after her urn was found on the side of the interstate.

Janice.

The story below looked like this before it looked like that.

Wright's Binders

Wright Thompson: I arrive in Odessa, Texas, flying low over black pump jacks, chasing the sort of weird, true crime story that often gets reporters on airplanes: A 16-year-old named Jerry Joseph, a basketball player at Permian High School of “Friday Night Lights” fame, has been found out as an impostor. Joseph isn’t really a Haitian orphan, and the tales he has spun for an eager town are lies; he’s really a 22-year-old from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., named Guerdwich Montimere. I check into a hotel on the outskirts of town and begin to search.

Eighteen months will pass. A year and a half of lies and mysteries and brain twisters about the fragility of identity, both to the person whose identity is in question and to those observing that person. A year and a half searching for a man named Guerdwich, and, at the end, not being sure whether he ever existed at all. But that’s for later.

In the beginning, there is an impostor.