SYPATHS OF GLORY: A Sportswriter Looks Back

by Tim Cohane ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Sportswriter Tim Cohane, longtime Corona jockey for Look magazine, can no more dodge a shocking-pink cliche than Gorgeous George ignore his marcel. A few samples of the Cohane simile, still warm from the curling iron, will illustrate the gusto with which Tim the Tessellator adorns the halls of sportsdom's tyrants and tetrarchs: ""...he soon proved Vainisi to have been an oasis of awareness in a Sahara of incomprehension""; ""...people responsible for choosing coaches are about as qualified as a Hindu to write a history of ice hockey""; ""...the things that basically brought Tunney to the title were the heart of a lion, a will of iron, and nerves of ice"". Nerves of ice, to describe the fighting style of boxing's most famous Bardolator, is better than exact. Among the more well-known figures hailed herein are also Dempsey, Archie Moore, Rocky Marciano, Grantland Rice, Harry Grayson, ""Red"" Sanders, Vince Lombardi, Ted Wilson, Ruth, Cobb, and the institutions of Fordham, Notre Dame and basketball coaching. This last is given a hilarious chapter, proving that basketball coaches are the most weird, wacky, unstable crew in sports. Of these, Everett Diddle issued perhaps the most confusing order in sports history when he told an incoming group of freshman players: ""All right, boys, line up against the wall alphabetically and according to height"". Out of Cohane's words flows great warmth, mellow with memories, like a man gabbing to a stranger at 4:30 A.M. in the Rose Bowl. Bruised prose for purple lions.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963

Categories: NONFICTION