1986 celebrity autobiography / WED 11-25-20 / Indian state along the Himalayas / Herbal drink full of antioxidants / Concerns for Cinderella and her stepsisters

Constructor: John Guzzetta and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (untimed)

THEME: "flipped" — themers are reverse homophones of other themers, where 1st and 2nd words of two-word themers swap places, aurally, in other themers. So:

Theme answers:

• MALE HEIR / AIR MAIL (16A: Prince, e.g. / 25A: Stamp on an envelope [and 16-Across flipped])
• TOW PLANE / PLAIN TOE (31A: It takes a glider up to launch altitude / 44A: Basic kind of shoe [and 31-Across flipped])
• TEE TIME / THYME TEA (50A: Golf reservation / 63A: Herbal drink full of antioxidants [and 50-Across flipped])

Word of the Day: Buck O'NEIL (4D: Buck ___, first African-American coach in Major League Baseball) —

Buck O'Neil (né John Jordan O'Neil Jr.; November 13, 1911 – October 6, 2006) was a first baseman and manager in the Negro American League, mostly with the Kansas City Monarchs. After his playing days, he worked as a scout, and became the first African American coach in Major League Baseball. In his later years he became a popular and renowned speaker and interview subject, helping to renew widespread interest in the Negro leagues, and played a major role in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

O'Neil's life was documented in Joe Posnanski's award-winning 2007 book The Soul of Baseball. (wikipedia)

Not sure how a puzzle manages six themers *and* eight 8+ long Downs *and* still manages to be this dull, but here we are. The theme gimmick is slight and leads to odd fill like TOW PLANE (you'll forgive me if I'm not up on my glider-related terminology), PLAIN TOE (looks like it's used in the shoe world but I can't find a good, solid definition of what it is) and worst of all THYME TEA, what the hell? People can make tea out of any old crap, but just because they can doesn't mean you should deem it puzzle-worthy. Also TEE TIME, while solid, is weird because it's also a very solid thing when you replace TEE with the homophone TEA. So the whole thing came off as both trivial and wobbly. But then there are allllllll those long Downs, and you'd expect to get some kind of juice out of those, right? But no. Something like VARIETY ACT, I pieced it together and thought "uh, OK." Too generic and slightly old-fashioned to be zingy. Worse was the even more generic TEAM MEMBER. I wrote in TEAM MASCOT and was semi-pleased with that. Having to replace MASCOT with the mere MEMBER was pretty disappointing. I guess I'm glad the longer answers were there, as thinking about them is undoubtedly more interesting than thinking about a whole passel of 3-to-5-letter answers ... but, today, not much more interesting. Weird day when SLOUCHED is the most interesting thing in the grid. Or maybe BALL GOWNS is more your speed. There's just an inexplicable lifelessness to this thing.