This book is as unconventional and wide-ranging as the author's remarkable career, in which he has chronicled the heroes and the characters of just about every sport in nearly every medium. He has gone from Princeton to Sports Illustrated in 1962; in 1990, editor in chief of The National Sports Daily; writing ten novels, winning a Peabody, an Emmy, and over fifteenth-hundred commentaries on NPR's Morning Edition. Interwoven through his personal history, he traces the entire arc of American sportswriting, from the lurid early days of the Police Gazette, through sportswriters Grantland Rice and Red Smith, and on up to ESPN