The Bases Were Loaded (and So Was I): Up Close and Personal with the Greatest Names in Sports

I am not a sports person. Except as sports figures have impacted the subjects I am interested in-I know Denny McLain was a good lounge organist who recorded fine albums; Joe DiMaggio was the second husband of Marilyn Monroe, was destroyed by her death (as was his son, then in the Marines), and possessed a bigger part of male anatomy than Secretariat; Thurman Munson was killed in one of the first SP Citations (earlier, identical ones legally required a two man crew, ridiculous because copilots were far more needed in light twins with GTSIO Continentals requiring a flight engineer to manage them than a "corporate jet" slower than a T-33 and which modified P-51 Mustangs could outrun at most altitudes)-sports don't interest me. But Callahan's book did. He covers Larry Bird,Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King, Wilt Chamberlain, Boris Becker, many other names (Palmer and Nicklaus,Pete Rose, and Graf and Seles) even someone like myself-who really does live under a rock sometimes-cannot not have heard. He makes them interesting as people, as with the older generations of sportswriters like Si Burick and Jimmy Cannon (a name well known to all Sinatraphiles, as with Jilly and Toots) who have now passed on. And his brief discussion of "the other Marilyn"-Marilyn Maxwell, a fine actress in her own right who really was named "Marvel Marilyn Maxwell" at birth, unlike Mary Ellen Miller and Norma Jeane Mortensen Dougherty DiMaggio, and who died sadly of a heart attack in her forties-was fascinating and left me curious enough to look up the above trivia. In summation, he fascinates people with sports who don't even like sports. Like Howard Stern, who can make you laugh in a traffic jam, that's a singular thing. Bravo!