LOOK WHAT SPORTS DID TO THIS LITTLE KID!

Spinner relates a lifetime of sports stories in this memoir.

In these pages, the author looks back on the many ways sports enthusiasm has shaped his life. His reminiscences are mostly rendered chronologically, beginning when he and his brother were students at Lisle, Illinois’ St. Procopius Academy in the 1960s and extending to 1992, when he was part of a teachers’ trip to Senegal, where he, as always, involved himself in sports, coaching a hapless basketball team. Along the way, he regales readers with one story after another, almost all of which include some deadpan punchline (“softballs were hard, and it is the reason that the little finger on my left hand now resembles the disfigured little finger on my right hand!”). Spinner began his long teaching career in 1969, the year of the first Apollo moon landing. “You are probably wondering how I can connect sports with the space program,” he gamely observes before pointing out that not only has he met Apollo XI astronaut Michael Collins but also that Alan Shepard, the fifth American to walk on the moon, was an avid golfer who actually swung his 6-iron in the lunar dust. Over the years of being a friendly, gregarious sports fanatic, Spinner has met a number of such celebrities, but the real charm of this completely endearing book is its everyman spirit. The author’s best stories are invariably his simplest and humblest, featuring ordinary events and reflections. He mentions Googling a classmate from Naperville High School and learning that he’d died in 2018, at Spinner’s current age. “This fact,” he writes, “very quickly made me once again realize the fragility and uncertainty of life.” He also affectionately remembers his time as a teacher in 1960s Ohio (and the absolute priority of the teachers’ bowling league). His frequent loving mentions of his wife, Patrice, while equally sports-oriented, are wonderfully touching.

A warm and inviting collection of sports tales from a gifted storyteller.