Ira Berkow has compiled from his newspaper columns these profiles of athletes at all stages of their art: the young who dream of glory ahead, those on the cusp of stardom, the athlete at the height of his or her success, the player on the way down, and the retiree. There is also the would-be athlete who never quite made it; the writers, broadcasters, and promoters on the fringes of the game; and the fan, who creates heroes and bums, stars and victims.

 

Sports is a business, a challenge, a vice, a character builder, a set of rules, a road to the top. For each person, it is something different. To see it all, one must look at such diverse individuals as Casey Stengel, Chris Evert, Joe Louis, Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, George Sauer, Muhammad Ali, Bobby Fischer, Rod Laver, Hank Aaron, Arnold Palmer, Gale Sayers, Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, Ted Williams, Jack Dempsey, and many others both as they see themselves and as others see them. The result of Berkow’s seventy-three pieces is no ordinary view of sports but a composite of all games, all athletes, and the good and the bad in a book of compelling interest.

Ira Berkow, winner of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize, recently retired after twenty-six years as a sports columnist and feature writer for the New York Times. His numerous books include Red: A Biography of Red Smith, available in a Bison Books edition, and the memoir Full Swing: Hits, Runs and Errors in a Writer’s Life.

 

Red Smith (1905–82) was one of America’s most outstanding sportswriters and the subject of Ira Berkow’s biography Red.

“Berkow’s 73 vignettes bristle with energy and action. Culled from his sports column for a news feature service, they evidence a newsman’s ability to pull out the human interest angle from the welter of available facts.”—Booklist

“Pleasingly atypical sports stories—pithy human interest vignettes with the focus on the athlete rather than his performance.”—Kirkus

“Wrapped together in this neat package, [these pieces] show Berkow as an astute observer of the national scene. . . . The best of these stories are as good as any ever written.”—Rick Kogan, Chicago Sun-Times

“Uncommonly excellent profiles of sports heroes. . . . A perceptive view and a keen ear for good quotes allow Berkow to present an honest view of a varied group of sports people.”—Library Journal

“This book is a cornucopia of Berkow’s work. . . . The man not only writes with poignancy and pizzazz, thinks with lucidity and logic, but, in these 700-word pearls, he also manages to feel and smell and laugh as well. It is called talent.”—Martin Ralbovsky, Houston Chronicle

“Ordinarily a collection of 73 short selections should contain some excellent pieces, some bad ones and a generous sampling of the mediocre. Not so in this volume, where Berkow . . . rings the bell time after time.”—Publishers Weekly

“Berkow can tell you all you need to know about a man as quickly as anyone around.”—Robert Armstrong, Minneapolis Tribune