Regarded as the founding father and one of the leading practitioners of what came to be known as the "Aw Nuts" school of sports journalism, William O'Connell McGeehan was reviled by sports promoters and admired by colleagues and successors for being an honest, authoritative, and imaginative sportswriter. Paul Gallico, who was covering sports for the New York Daily News while McGeehan was writing and editing for the New York Herald Tribune, called him the "brilliant McGeehan, the greatest sports-writer who ever lived." Gene Tunney, the heavyweight boxing champion about whom McGeehan wrote both favorably and unfavorably, referred to him as "that prince of sports writers." Randall Poe notes that in an era when the sports hero was "spiced and fattened" on the sports pages, McGeehan "refused to serve the Hero." Poe ranks McGeehan and his successors, John Lardner and Red Smith, as "perhaps the best three sportswriters of...