For over 10 years, Roger Black performed at the highest level in the world of athletics.

BBC: Roger Black MBE

Roger Black, who won silver in the 400 meters at the Atlanta Games in 1996, was part of a coterie of top-notch British runners who trained on a grass track at the University of Southampton.

WSJ: Menu

You couldn't ask for a more alarming declaration of noble intent than the authentically scraggly black beard Leonardo DiCaprio sports as Roger Ferris, CIA point man in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Dubai and other spots in the Levant.

CNN: Review: 'Body of Lies' flat

Much of the time Roger looks either haunted or absent, not a black hole but a gray one.

WSJ: Film Reviews: 'Greenberg,' 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,' 'The Art of the Steal,' Repo Men'

It signaled not only Ghana's long-awaited arrival at football biggest global gathering but also a fulfillment of a prediction in 1990 by Cameroon legend Roger Milla that the world had not seen the best of African football until the Black Stars made it to the World Cup.

CNN: Ghana looks to World Cup after U-20 success

Thirty months later he is dead: garrotted in the snow in Harlem's Roger Morris Park while nearby, young Aurelia Treene and Kevin Garland, both supposedly scions of black America's aristocracy, celebrate their engagement.

ECONOMIST: New fiction

He's collaborating on a series of special-edition guitars with musicians like Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, whose tricked-out 12-string comes, signed, in a black denim case.

FORBES: Stringing them along