John R. Tunis was an unusual sportswriter for his or any other time. During the years between the two world wars, when he did most of his sportswriting, he made his living by questioning the values underlying sport in America in article after article. He continued such questioning in the children's books, most of which concerned sports, that he began writing in the late 1930s. Tunis saw the position of sports in American life as central, describing it in his autobiography, A Measure of Independence (1964), as "a kind of substitute for the theater.... Our great sports events mean what the comedies and tragedies of the Greek playwrights meant to the citizens of Athens as they packed the theater of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis after the passing of the winter solstice." A close reader of the central works of the cultural historians Vernon Parrington and Richard...