NO CHEERING IN THE PRESS BOX

The way it was in sports twenty, thirty, forty years ago -- you can just about smell the cigar smoke and the stale beer in the city rooms of the Omaha Bee News, the Wichita Beacon and the Milwaukee Sentinel as a bunch of veteran sportswriters chew over the players, managers and coaches of yesteryear. Red Smith, Dan Daniel, Paul Gallico, Jimmy Cannon and fourteen others sounding off on what they thought of Dempsey and Rockne, Roger Hornsby and Casey Stengel -- recorded and edited by Holtzman. It was above all else a grind -- endless weeks on the road following the teams, sleeping in third rate hotels, long hours, small pay. From baseball to polo these men covered it all, on dull days creating their own stories -- like Paul Gallico who stepped into the ring with Dempsey, the champ (""It was as if a building had fallen on me""), just to see what it would be like. Just like everything else, sportswriting was more personal in those days and most of these memories are laced with bourbon and nostalgia. Except perhaps, for the late Jimmy Cannon who takes some vigorous swipes at the New Journalism and declares flat out ""I think the great athletes are fortunate that they met me."" For sports aficionados and anyone who gets off on the sweaty glamor of newspapers.