Monthly Archive for January, 2011

By Laura Hillenbrand, in The Observer

In the late 1920s, a cunning boy named Louis Zamperini was wreaking havoc in his hometown of Torrance, California. A serial runaway and artful dodger, he robbed his neighbours’ kitchens, put grease on streetcar rails and toothpicks in his teacher’s tyres, he pelted policemen with tomatoes and ran clever scams to part locals from their money. But when Louie reached his teens he made a momentous discovery: he was a gifted runner. From then on, he channelled his defiance into track, displaying prodigious talent that carried him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and within sight of the fabled four-minute mile.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, the athlete became an airman, joining the Army Air Corps. While training to be a bombardier, he formed a close friendship with his roommate and pilot, a gentle-tempered pastor’s son named Russell Phillips, known to all as Phil. In the autumn of 1942, Louie and Phil were transferred to Oahu in Hawaii to begin their war journey together. Serving in a B-24 bomber they called Super Man, they saw months of harrowing combat, culminating in an epic battle with Japanese Zeros over the island of Nauru in April 1943. With half of his crew severely wounded and his plane’s brakes shot, steering crippled, right rudder blown half off and fuselage blasted with 600 holes, Phil somehow nursed Super Man home.

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By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, from The New Republic:

In the spring of 1964, Gay Talese was on assignment for Esquire at Floyd Patterson’s upstate New York training camp, when the former heavyweight champion of the world got a phone call from his wife Sandra. The Pattersons lived in Scarsdale, and they were heroes of the liberal imagination, but it was only 1964 and they were still racial pioneers. Their seven-year-old daughter, Jeannie, was the only black student in her class, and—as Sandra told Floyd—had been harassed by some white boys at school who had teased her, and lifted up her skirt. The boxer was incensed, and he interrupted his training—for a rematch with the thuggish titleholder Sonny Liston—and left immediately. He flew back to Westchester in his private Cessna, through heavy smoke that came wafting up from a forest fire, determined to put things right. We know both the detail of the forest fire and the champion’s political state of mind because Patterson also brought with him a first-rate reporter, Talese.

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