Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original magazine edition for enjoyable reading. (Worth every penny spent!)
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"Old HARDHEAD", a piece published by Hearst International, was a combined effort of three talented dynamos:
Author, Damon Runyon: Best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era.
Author, Bozeman Bulger: little remembered today, but pioneered the development of American sportswriting.
Illustrator, Frank Godwin: a prolific editorial and advertising illustrator.
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An exerpt from the beginning of the story... written with that quintessential Runyonesque style:
IN THE backwash of baseball, along that beach where sporting writers go prodding around with a stick, one finds the specimens that are rare and of historical value. Printed records, of necessity, concern themselves with the main stream only.
You may scan the officially compiled documents with a microscopic eye, but, we daresay, you will find not a fragment of information bearing on the career of the recruit who came up as a sure-fire hitter only to eat himself out of the
league in exactly three months. That is a record one finds in beachcombing.
Very likely, not having waded in this backwash, you have little or no knowledge of the coming pitcher of the decade who blew himself out of the league by incessantly practicing on a cornet so as to show the boys something when he got back home.
Poke around in that rim of driftwood thrown aside by the ever-moving stream and your prod may disclose the pennant winning pitcher who was tried and dismissed on the strength of a detective's report that he drank forty-two glasses
of beer, ate a bowl of pretzels and consumed fifteen raw onions in a single afternoon during the baseball season.
This report he vehemently labelled a lie...
