NOBODY ASKED ME, BUT. . . The World of Jimmy Cannon

Cannon's influence on the newspapermen of his generation extends well beyond the sports pages which were his special purview, and he is generally considered to be one of the progenitors of the (now middle-aged) ""New Journalism"" which spawned writers like Breslin and Newfield. This collection of his columns is weighted toward the later stuff, away from the 1950s which were probably his prime, and, in the case of baseball which Cannon cherished as ""a ballet performed in a metropolitan meadow,"" it is made up largely of testimonials to the greats of the sport: the Babe, Ty Cobb, Mantle, Mays, Sandy Koufax. This celebration of success, though engaging, is less typical of Cannon than his accounts of the hangers-on, journeymen, and has-beens. Of Doc Kearns, Dempsey's old manager: ""Doc died busted, if the guys who owed him had paid him off, he would have been wealthy. On the last day of his life Doc was starting all over again at eighty. He was shilling for a kid heavyweight named Jefferson Davis. Of course, Davis was another Dempsey. . . ."" Included too are the stray one-liners that seemed to drift up from Cannon's subconscious, the ones that began with ""Nobody asked me, but. . . ."" Some are plain funny: ""If Howard Cosell were a sport, it would be roller derby""; others reflect the condition of urban man at bay: ""I like to sit against the wall in restaurants."" This collection, long overdue, will be a boon to those who remember and miss him and those who missed out because they were kids when his columns ran.