I Wear My Wartime Coat in the Wind and Sleet

Still he is always an impressive figure at banquets such as this--an "immortal" sports writers called him, and that is how they have written about him and others like him, rarely suggesting that such heroes might ever be prone to the ills of mortal men, carousing, drinking, scheming; to suggest this would destroy the myth, would disillusion small boys, would infuriate rich me who own ball clubs and to whom baseball is a business dedicated to profit and in pursuit of which they trade mediocre players' flesh as casually as boys trade players' pictures on bubble-gum cards. And so the baseball hero must always act the part, must preserve the myth, and none does it better than DiMaggio, none is more patient when drunken old me grab an arm and ask, "Who's gonna take it this year, Joe?"

"The Silent Season of a Hero" by Gay Talese in Esquire (1966)

Current Reading
The Best American Sports Writing of the Century--Edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout