From gridiron to diamond, lawn to green, a legendary sportswriter captures the wins, losses, and draws of an exciting period in American sports history Throughout his long and distinguished career, Herbert Warren Wind covered many of the most dramatic contests and iconic athletes of the twentieth century. Inspired by Paul Gallico's classic dispatches from the golden age of the 1920s and '30s, The Gilded Age of Sport collects Wind's finest pieces on the people and places of the postwar era. With graceful prose and an authoritative eye for the telling detail, he profiles sports heroes including Yogi Berra, Ben Hogan, Maurice Richard, Bob Cousy, Sam Snead, Ted Williams, Herb Elliott, and Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman. Wind reveals Rocky Marciano's training regimen, journeys as far afield as Japan and Australia to report on the international sports scene, and delights in the startling discrepancy between the woeful record of Harvard's football team and the glory of its marching band. An elegant and comprehensive survey of fifteen thrilling years in sports history, The Gilded Age of Sport is a testament to the versatility, wit, and wisdom of a master craftsman.
"Thoughtful, judicious, balanced, the best of its kind since Paul Gallico's Farewell to Sport . . . Mr. Wind is a gifted and versatile craftsman."
John R. Tunis, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] rich harvest of basketball, golf, tennis, baseball, hockey even the Harvard Band and Mayor Curley. Wind gets into the hearts of his subject whether he writes of Maurice Richard, one of hockey's greats, or Sam Snead and Ben Hogan on the fairway or Helen Wills on the courts. One catches the feel of the player and the spectator."
Kirkus Reviews
"The most devoted American on the course, and the most elegant. His writing on [golf], and on tennis and other sports, too . . . was always spare, measured, and sure, like the man."
