The golden age of sports was perhaps the only event Harold Rosenthal missed in the twentieth century. He was there for just about everything else. He started writing when Jack Kramer and Bobby Riggs were on the tennis circuit in the early 1930s, and he was there in 1997 to write the Super Bowl XXXII essay for the official program booklet (had Super Bowl I failed, Rosenthal mused, "January might as well be missing one Sunday"). Rosenthal was at the top of the sportswriting game during its own golden age in the period just after World War II, and he was for years one of the stalwart figures in Stanley Woodward's sports department at the New York Herald Tribune. Although television and computers changed the way fans absorbed their sports entertainment, as well as the way sportswriters wrote their prose, Rosenthal never parted ways with the written word, or...