Franz Lidz  Franz Lidz (born 24 September 1951) is an American writer, journalist and pro basketball executive. A former senior writer for "Sports Illustrated", he's a "Smithsonian magazine" columnist, a "New York Times" film, science and archeology essayist, and a onetime vice president for the Detroit Pistons. His childhood memoir "Unstrung Heroes" was adapted into a Hollywood film of the same title in 1995. Lidz was born in Manhattan, to Sidney, an electronics engineer who designed the first transistorized portable tape recorder (the Steelman Transitape). His father gave him early exposure to authors like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco. At age nine, he moved to the Philadelphia suburbs. Lidz attended high school in Cheltenham and college at Antioch College, where he was a theater major. Lidz was a novice reporters at the weekly "Sanford Star", where he wrote a column and covered police and fire beats. He left Maine to become a crime reporter and write a column called "Insect Jazz" for an alternative newspaper in Baltimore. He later became an editor of "Johns Hopkins University" Magazine. In 1980, he joined the staff of "Sports Illustrated," even though he had never read the magazine and had covered only one sporting event in his life – a pigeon race in Shapleigh, Maine. Lidz remained on the writing staff for 27 years. In 2007 he jumped to the short-lived business monthly "Conde Nast Portfolio", and then WSJ. magazine before landing at "Smithsonian" in 2012. Among his most controversial magazine features are essays on Neanderthals; Hannibal, George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees' line of succession; the hijinks of onetime Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling; and a groundbreaking "S.I." cover story with NBA player Jason Collins in which Collins became the first active male in one of the four major North American team sports to announce he was gay. "Unstrung Heroes" is about Lidz's childhood, with his mother, father and his dad's four older brothers. He had previously written about two of the uncles in" Sports Illustrated". In his review of "Unstrung Heroes" in the "New York Times", Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the memoir "unusual and affecting... a melancholy, funny book, a loony tune played with touching disharmony on mournful woodwinds and a noisy klaxon."