[Author of the best-seller] The Boys of Summer, ... The Head Game |
A major league baseball team is a collection of 25 youngish men who have made the major leagues and discovered that in spite of it, life remains distressingly short of ideal. |
Aware, but unself-conscious, Reese and Robinson came to personify integration. If a man didn't like what they personified, why, he better not play for the Dodgers. |
Basketball, hockey and track meets are action heaped upon action, climax upon climax, until the onlooker's responses become deadened. Baseball is for the leisurely afternoons of summer and for the unchanging dreams. |
Boxing is smoky halls and kidneys battered until they bleed. |
Football is violence and cold weather and sex and college rye. |
He was Jackie Robinson's friend, |
Horse racing is animated roulette. |
Horse racing is animated roulette. |
I covered a team that no longer exists in a demolished ballpark for a newspaper that is dead, |
I see the boys of summer in their ruin. |
I was showing early symptoms of becoming a professional baseball man. I was lying to the press. |
Look at the national furor it caused. If baseball is losing its hold on the people, why is everybody having a nervous breakdown because Rocker said some dumb things? I think baseball still has a huge hold on this country. |
So this is the first book I've written with a title supplied by a major league ballplayer, |
Tennis and golf are best played, not watched. |