PAPER TIGER: An Autobiography

Sportswriter Stanley Woodward's autobiography, while lacking the royal purple of champion prose, belts the page like a clean left hook to a glass jaw. Woodward's father early filled his son with his own passion for sports. At fourteen near blindness forced the boy to give up most activities, but after a series of operations he found he could still play line at Amherst while never seeing the ball (""I was plunged into a world of vague shapes and thunderous cracks that I never saw coming""). Later, he turned semi-pro. His mother got him his first job as a cub reporter and he never left the newspaper field for 60 years, eventually winding up on the Herald Trib. Today retired, Woodward takes a black view of newspaper unions, but his memory for his greatest assignments is very bright indeed.