Bob Considine began his sportswriting career during the so-called Golden Age of sports, which lasted from shortly after World War I until about the time of the Great Depression. During the 1920s journalism was generally dedicated to the process of celebrity making, and sports pages around the country contributed such luminaries as Jack Dempsey ("The Manassa Mauler"), Red Grange ("The Galloping Ghost"), Babe Ruth ("The Sultan of Swat"), and "Big" Bill Tilden. The typical prose of sportswriters of the time bordered on mawkishness and sometimes endowed athletes with mythical abilities--what some scholars have termed as "fakelore." There were those sportswriters, such as Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and Ring Lardner, who usually rose above such sentimentality; yet, even they still built their essential sporting heroes in the magazines and New York City papers.

Considine became a sportswriter while working as a State Department clerk in Washington, D.C., in...