A Sportswriter’s Life

Gerald Eskenazi covered sports for the New York Times for almost 50 years. Along the way he wrote biographies of Bill Veeck and Leo Durocher as well as as-told-to autobiographies of Carl Yastrzemski and Willie Mays. From his perch at the Times Eskenazi has covered just about every noteworthy sports story of the past 50 years.
Now Eskenazi has written his very own (!) autobiography, A Sportswriter’s Life: From the Desk of a New York Times Reporter. The book tells the great, all-American story of a second generation American who lived out his wildest adolescent professional dreams. Eskenazi’s book reminded me of the criterion Holden Caulfield applied to measure the quality of books in The Catcher in the Rye — does the book make you want to call the author and talk to him? The book scores a ten out of ten on the Caulfield Index.
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Eskenazi covered the 1980 Olympics, where he met up with Herb Brooks. When the film “Miracle” was released earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal published Eskenazi’s column on his 1980 encounter with Brooks. It’s the best short profile of Brooks I have ever read. (Click here for my post on Eskenazi’s column on Brooks with a link to the column.)
Having written the profile for a newspaper with a circulation of a million, Eskenazi surprised me when he emailed his thanks for our mention of the column on Power Line. As for the book, I finished it sick in bed a few weeks ago, simultaneously laughing, crying, and coughing. This afternoon Eskenazi is joining us to discuss his autobiography on our local Northern Alliance Radio show at 1:30. Join us if you can.

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