A presentation of the best of Smith's inimitable columns...miniature masterpieces that set the gold standard for sportswriting. Includes Smith's indelible profiles of sports luminaries and unforgettable accounts of historic occasions, which show his gift for distilling a career's essence in a single column.

During World War I, American army camps, navy stations, and marine barracks formed football's first true all-star teams, which competed against each other and top colleges while raising millions of dollars for the war effort. In War Football: World War I and the Birth of the NFL, Chris Serb details three long-forgotten seasons of American football when college amateurs mixed with blue-collar pros on the field of play. These games showed investors...

Twenty years before women's soccer became an Olympic sport and two decades before the formation of the WNBA, the '76 US women's basketball team laid the foundation for the incredible rise of women's sports in America at the youth, collegiate, Olympic, and professional levels. Though they were unknowns from small schools such as Delta State, the University of Tennessee at Martin and John F. Kennedy College of Wahoo, Nebraska, at the time of the '76...

""The Umpire Is Out" is a fascinating journey about Dale Scott's umpiring career along with his being a pioneer for LGBTQ people within not just baseball but across sports"-- "Dale Scott's career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, working in every...

"One of the most innovative minds in business provides an equally original guide to getting ahead. Frank Bennack's accomplishments in media and business are unrivaled. He was named chief executive of Hearst in 1979, and for nearly 30 years he helped solidify the company's reputation as a leader in consumer media, overseeing the purchase of more than two dozen television stations and several major newspapers (Houston Chronicle), the launch of top-selling...