For millions of sports fans--and for more than forty years--Dick Young was the premier sportswriter of the New York Daily News, the newspaper that traditionally has had the largest circulation in New York City. In the 1940s and 1950s the Daily News arguably employed the best sports staff in New York--Joe Trimble, Jim McCulley, Jimmy Powers, Gene Ward, and cartoonist Bill Gallo, whose caricatures adorned Young's column. But Young was the star of the group. Ironically, when he first joined the Daily News in 1937, he was not interested in writing about sports: "I wanted to be a hotshot newspaperman like Walter Winchell," he told Ross Wetzsteon. "I wanted to be a stop-the-presses guy, competing with the other paper for the scoop and for the girl." In "Dick Young's America," his article in Best Sports Stories: 1986, Wetzsteon estimated that Young wrote four thousand words a week and more than...