When I played softball for Esquire, against Screw

Al Goldstein, who died recently and made the front page of the New York Times, was among the world’s most disgusting men. But hardly as repellent as Charles Saatchi and certainly without the coward’s bullying manner — against women, that is. Goldstein founded Screw magazine during the Sixties and pushed hard-core porn into the mainstream without the usual excuses of it being art disguised as porn, or vice versa. He apologised for nothing and took no prisoners and gave the finger to an outraged establishment who thought him rather vulgar, to say the least. I met him once and it was on a baseball diamond.

Back in the Seventies there was a regular softball competition in New York’s Central Park among magazines — most of them, like Life, Look, Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, now gone. I played third base for Esquire and as luck would have it we drew Screw in the first round.