Dan Parker occupied a special niche among newspapermen, one that prompted Newsweek (13 April 1964) to call him the "conscience of sports columnists." For more than forty years, first in Connecticut and then in New York, Parker exposed corruption and chicanery in the sports world wherever and whenever he saw it. "Dan was always on the side of the angels," said sportswriter Red Smith, then with the New York Herald Tribune. "He had no patience at all with sin." Another contemporary, sports columnist W. C. Heinz, said of Parker, "He is the cop on the national sports beat. Let a jockey pull a horse in California, a fighter throw a match in Des Moines, or a Minnesota promoter run off with the profits of a so-called charity show, and Parker will report it." Parker was called "a shy soft-spoken Connecticut Yankee" by Newsweek, but there was nothing soft-spoken about his...