Several eye operations left young Stanley Woodward with tunnel vision, a limited view of objects to his right and left sides, but clear sight of what is directly ahead. In that manner Woodward, one of the best-known American sports editors, was to pursue his livelihood, with his bottle-thick lenses locked on his target--whether in belaboring his journalistic rivals or in taking on wartime enemies.

Blind for a time before the surgeries, Woodward never became the major league catcher that his father had hoped the boy would become. But he did pitch ("fast and wild," as his friend and colleague Red Smith said), and he played tackle as a football player at Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1917. As a sports editor of the New York Herald Tribune Woodward left a legacy of having assembled the greatest sportswriting staff in the history of the American newspaper by recruiting...