Back on the Lunch Circuit

My old friend Roland Lazenby and I finally got to break the Covid spell and have lunch today. The regular events I've missed as much as anything else during the past year have been frequent lunches with good friends, people with whom I have much in common, people who can hold up their end of the conversation indefinitely.

Ro, of course, is one of the nation's premier sports biographers, a man whose 60-odd books reveal a hell of a lot more than how to dunk a basketball. He gets to the heart of his topic with sophisticated reporting--the subject doesn't know much of what he reveals until the book is published--and crisp writing. His work is often long and involved and considers historical context not only of the biography subject, but also of that subject's family and ancestors.

His latest--on which he has already written 300,000 words (the equivalent of three long books), with 40,000 more cut already, is a bio of Magic Johnson, the man who left basketball with AIDS. Johnson is/was a sex addict with a fascinating story and, since Roland has been covering him since the late 1980s or early 1990s, he knows the story in its intimate detail--so to speak.

Needless to say that the volume of material, its freshness and its marketability are causing stress. Just about every time Ro finishes a book, I hear him say, "I'm not writing another biography for as long as I live!" He begins another within weeks.

It was an absolute delight to sit with one of our best storytellers for an hour today. And it is refreshing to get that part of my life back.