One of my happiest moments as editor of this magazine has been the chance to publish this story about the Portland Mavericks.

In case you’ve never heard of them, they were a hard-drinking, rabble-rousing independent minor league baseball team in the 1970s, owned by Kurt Russell’s dad Bing. I’ve long wanted to write about them, in fact I bought an old Portland Mavericks program off of eBay about ten years ago, but I knew I’d have to be in Portland to make it happen.

So instead I assigned the piece to a Eugene Register-Guard writer named Adam Jude, who did a tremendous job and even scored an interview with Kurt Russell–as far as I’ve been able to tell, it’s the most in-depth interview Russell’s ever done on the topic.

Adam did a terrific job writing the piece, I think you’ll get a kick out of it.