At the center of it all is the blending of color and motion. Willie Mays, magic number 24 emblazoned in blue on his back, bludgeons one more left-hand fast ball through a ripple of yellow and goodbye. A tennis player, wrong-footed, spins his Nikes back to the corner he just left. The ball is dying; he races to keep it alive. Banners splash the sky with red as 20,000 leaping spectators blend into a froth of colors.
"The close-up expressions and emotions and attitudes--the strains, grimaces, grunts, the physicality of sport--this is my natural preserve." So says Leroy Neiman in Winners, his recollection of 30 years of patrolling that preserve. He was the first serious artist to become first and foremost a sports artist. His familiar face, vivid haberdashery and inimitable brushery have made him one of a handful of artist celebrities. His style is recognized by millions, some of whom knew nothing about art--or knew nothing about sports--before he came along.
Neiman has done most of what he set out to do in sports. He plans to concentrate on other kinds of motion now, but that doesn't mean he thinks he has just been wasting paint. "Having never thought sports too banal to paint seriously," he says, "I . . . am not reluctant to feel proud of having brought art, through sports, into the lives of countless people who might otherwise not have been exposed to it."
It's no coincidence that Neiman is celebrating 30 years in the public eye at almost the same time we are. He and Playboy grew up together. Back in 1954, when his brushes' bristles were longer than those in his 'stache, he toiled as an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hugh Hefner, a friend with a new magazine, thought the Neiman trompes deserved a l'oeil following. Since then, as magazine and artist have grown in stature and popularity, the friendship has continued. Neiman's work for Playboy has helped make him the highest-paid living artist, and he's done more Playboy artistry than anyone else. Even the Femlins that adorn our Party Jokes pages are his.
Winners: My Thirty Years in Sports sells for $85, which sounds steep until you consider that the works reproduced in it would cost $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 if you could buy all of them, which you can't. But why now, LeRoy? You've been at this since Herschel Walker, whose shoulders fill a page in your book, was a negative eight years old. Why state the case now?
"Not young enough for theory nor poor enough to be bitter nor old enough to reflect," runs the artist's litany, "I welcome the idea of putting my body of work in the realm of sports on the record myself, rather than leaving it entirely to the care of others whose affection for this playpen of games may not be as strong or as enduring as my own."
