ABSTRACT
In the writing of the obituaries of famous American jazz figures there seems to be a special entitlement. No tribute would be complete if it did not recapture the flavor of the old jive talk with a touch of dirty realism. Not all the stories in that morning's paper were able to feature the day's quota of obscenities with such star-like clarity. There were one or two other saucy items in the paper's daily allocation, but since the one was not published in anything approaching full-frontal phallic plainness and the other was not a four-letter word. The times are long since gone the various games in a "sporting culture" could be categorized, if the sociological impulse be strong, by social class–"upper class" in tennis, "working class" in soccer. The difficulty over the years is to keep the reader on the run, persistently guessing; and the verbal variety of an athlete's conversation helps to keep the "in-depth" interviews various and undulating.
