Word: lanier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great artist is reborn at the hour of his death. His works cast a larger and more durable shadow than the man who wrote them. So it will prove with Thomas Lanier Williams, a.k.a. Tennessee, who choked to death in Manhattan last week (after swallowing the cap of a medicine bottle). With the debatable exception of Eugene O'Neill, he was the greatest playwright in U.S. dramatic history...
...violated. The sense of loss and vulnerability that one finds in his characters was imprinted on the playwright at an early age. Williams was born in his Episcopalian clergyman grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Miss. His forebears included a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables: Poet Sidney Lanier (1842-81), some Tennessee Indian fighters, an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis Xavier's. When Tennessee was seven, the sunlit backyards of his boyhood were exchanged for rows of St. Louis brick flats the color of "dried blood and mustard." The change...
...buddies: Bob Lanier, Kevin Porter, Ralph Simpson, Eric Money, John Shumate, Chris Ford, Ben Poquette and M.L. Carr. Once childhood heroes, these were the guys I worked with. In December, when the Detroit Piston Basketball Corporation Christmas cards arrived, there I was--along with the players, coaches, secretaries and janitors wishing the Motor City fans a happy Noel...
There were more perfect moments than anyone could have hoped for: playing Mattel Electronic Football with Ben Poquette; having big Bob Lanier call me a "dumb white boy" after I ran over his size-22 foot with a vacuum cleaner. And then giving me a big smile...
Four years later, former Piston Head Coach Herb Brown is teaching basketball to high school girls somewhere in Arizona. Ben Poquette is a scrub with Utah, and Bob Lanier is closing out his playing days in Milwaukee...