During his thirteen years as a sportswriter, sports editor, and columnist for the New York Daily News, Paul Gallico wrote, by his own estimation, 5.11 million words. With those words he described and commented on the feats of a generation of giants--including Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, Helen Wills Moody, Johnny Weissmuller, and Gar Wood--during what has been called the Golden Age of Sports. He became one of the highest-paid sportswriters in the country. Then, in 1936, at the age of thirty-nine, he walked away from that position to pursue a freelance writing career. Little of what he wrote during the next four decades concerned sports, and few of those who enjoyed his novels, stories, and screenplays knew that he had gotten his start as a sportswriter. But the daily experience of trying to capture in words, under a deadline, the games people play gave vitality to all his...