Doing Damage with Duke is the latest article written by Hunter S. Thompson where the Good Doctor mulls betting on Duke even after he was asked to leave after being too drunk at a lecture. Here's a bit:
The late, legendary author George Plimpton told the story better than I can. In his book,"The Best of Plimpton" (Atlantic Monthly Press), he writes ...
I had met (Hunter Thompson) on the plane coming down from Europe. He had arrived on board at Frankfurt -- a big, loose-limbed figure wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses, a purple and strawberry Acapulco shirt, blue jeans, and a pair of Chuck Taylor All Star basketball sneakers that seemed too large for his feet, as if he had snatched them from the back of a Los Angeles Laker's locker. They took him this way and that, sashaying him around so that he bumped into people a lot. With him he carried a large leather flight bag with a "Rolling Stone" identification decal and a badge which read PRESS ... full of pills and vials and bottles, judging from the way it clinked when he moved it ...
He sat with me during the flight. He said he was trying to recover from a humiliating evening back in the States a few nights before when, lecturing at Duke University, he had been given the hook for being outlandishly drunk on Wild Turkey bourbon and making a fool of himself in front of a large and muttering audience. The representative who met him at the airport had offered him some hashish. He had taken it. Back in the motel, he felt the day begin to slip away. He poured himself a couple of shots of Wild Turkey. He kept his audience waiting for forty-five minutes. When he walked out with his glass in front of a large velvet curtain in the university auditorium, he got himself in a further state of belligerency with the crowd by starting off, "I'm very happy to be here at the alma mater of Richard Nixon."Alas, Hunter is betting on Duke. I'm sticking with UConn.
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