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Sports Illustrated's 1999 Book Review

A Flame of Pure Fire | A Jerk on One End | The Majors | The Sporting Life | Alpine Circus | Knockdown | Dwight Davis: The Man and The Cup

Boxing

A Flame of Pure Fire, By Roger Kahn Harcourt Brace

A Flame of Pure Fire
By Roger Kahn
Harcourt Brace, $28

Of all the icons of the Roaring '20s, from Lucky Lindy to the Babe, the one most commonly and unaccountably neglected is heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. Roger Kahn has rectified that oversight with this absorbing and unabashedly sentimental biography of the old Manassa Mauler. Kahn regards Dempsey not only as "at his peak, the greatest fighter who ever lived" but also as "that rare thing: close up, as from afar [a hero]."

Dempsey was also something of a paradox. Outside the ring, he was the quintessential nice guy: friendly, full of fun, even witty, and so generous that he gave away perhaps a fifth of his fortune to indigent ex-pugs. Inside the ropes, though, he was his opponents' worst nightmare: a snorting, snarling engine of destruction with explosive power in both fists. For Dempsey, boxing wasn't so much a matter of winning or losing as of killing or being killed. It was a homely philosophy he learned in the hobo jungles and mining-camp saloons of his impoverished Colorado youth.

Kahn brilliantly recounts Dempsey's great victories over Jess Willard, Georges Carpentier and Luis Firpo, as well as the sad defeats in Dempsey's declining years at the clever hands of Gene Tunney and, in their second fight, from the suspected treachery of "long count" referee Dave Barry. Kahn also provides in Dos Passos-like vignettes a look back at the extraordinary times in which Dempsey thrived.

Just one small cavil: The fact that Kahn actually knew Dempsey gives his portrait added verisimilitude. But must it also give him license to pepper his pages with self-aggrandizing he-told-me's? Is it necessary for the author to depart from a description of Dempsey's first wife as a sometime barroom pianist into an irrelevant account of his own adventure with a woman similarly employed?

But why quibble? This is quite simply Kahn's finest work since he made The Boys of Summer part of the language.

Issue date: Nov. 1, 1999

Fishing

A Jerk on One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman
By Robert Hughes
Ballantine Books, $18.95

The true value of this all-too-brief book, part of the publisher's Library of Contemporary Thought series, is that the reader need not be a fisherman -- or, for that matter, even a fish eater -- to enjoy it. This reviewer, for example, equates a morning spent knee-deep in a trout stream as a torture comparable to gum surgery or being forced at gunpoint to read the collected works of Danielle Steel. But Hughes is such a provocative and entertaining writer that if his subject were, say, crabgrass containment, he'd still be worth reading. The celebrated author and TIME magazine art critic makes catching creatures of the water seem like one of the most fascinating activities known to man.

The first part of this book speculates, often hilariously, on the mysterious pleasures of the amateur angler -- "Fishing largely consists of not catching fish," Hughes notes -- while the second is dedicated to a reasoned assault on the excesses of the high-tech commercial fishing industry, which is systematically depleting the population of the world's oceans. But the difficulty in protecting fish, "or at least in regulating and reducing the wholesale killing, is their utter unlikeness to us," Hughes concedes. "They are cold, dumb and slimy, though indubitably good to eat."

Issue date: Oct. 4, 1999

Golf

The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf's Holy Grail
By John Feinstein
Little, Brown and Co., $24.50

There are many entertaining vignettes in The Majors, which microscopically examines last year's Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA golf championships. The problem is finding them. Feinstein is a dogged reporter with a talent for extracting amusing anecdotes from his subjects, but those stories are often buried under an avalanche of old news and overly detailed play-by-play. For instance, before he addresses the Masters of 1998, we must wade through the following: The course was once a nursery called Fruitlands; Arnold Palmer won his first green jacket in 1958, Jack Nicklaus won his first in 1963; Augusta National's greens are slick; and there's an annual champions' dinner. Oh, and in 1997 Fuzzy Zoeller caused a brouhaha with crude remarks after Tiger Woods won. No surprises here.

The same is true of Feinstein's accounts of the other three majors. The U. S. Open is cause to remind us in detail of the Casey Martin uproar last year and of Tom Watson's famous chip-in at Pebble Beach's 17th hole to win in 1982. Remarkably, in his preamble to the British Open, Feinstein wanders a circuitous path that somehow winds up describing Watson's play at Pebble's 18th hole in 1982.

But there are some golden nuggets that even the most avid followers of the game might not have mined. At the start, Feinstein describes David Duval at the Masters being shepherded into the Bobby Jones cabin to await a possible playoff. Duval thinks he has a one-stroke lead over Mark O'Meara and is aghast when CBS reveals that the two men are, in fact, tied. When O'Meara hits his approach 20 feet right of the pin at 18, Jack Stephens, then chairman of Augusta National, tells Duval to relax. "Nobody makes this putt," Stephens says. O'Meara does, of course, and Stephens is on his way out to congratulate the winner, leaving Duval feeling, in Feinstein's words, "as if someone had kicked him hard in the stomach."

Feinstein reveals that David Fay, the executive director of the USGA, was a cabin boy one summer on an ocean liner. Among his duties was to clean up whenever a passenger got sick. One day, responding to a call, he knocked on a cabin door, and there stood a slightly green Duke of Windsor. Sometime later, Fay bumped into the duke again, at the Tuxedo (N.Y.) Club. When the duke eyed him curiously, Fay reminded him of their previous encounter. "Oh, yes," said the duke wanly.

Feinstein's books have a way of creeping onto best-seller lists, and this one probably will, too. Followers of the game to whom the name Eldrick means nothing will enjoy it.

-- Walter Bingham
Issue date: March 22, 1999

Misc. Short Stories

The Sporting Life
By Bill Barich
The Lyons Press, $22.95

Barich is another excellent writer on fishing and the outdoors, but he is equally at home in the less savory environments of the racetrack and the prizefighting ring, as this collection of his journalism demonstrates. In none of these diverse activities does he pretend to be an expert; he is simply enjoying himself. He has a fine time talking boxing with a second-rate San Francisco junior middleweight or trailing a Russian baseball team, the Moscow Red Devils, on an edifying if athletically humiliating tour of the West Coast. The Red Devils, Barich writes, "were as studiously correct as pupils at a dancing school, concentrating so hard on their steps that they scarcely heard the melody."

Issue date: Oct. 4, 1999

Skiing short stories

Alpine Circus
By Michael Finkel
The Lyons Press, $22.95

If Hughes and Barich are uncommonly astute observers, Finkel represents a kind of latter-day Richard Halliburton, a youthful adventurer willing to go anywhere and do anything for kicks. The difference in this collection is that all of Finkel's adventures are on skis. He hits the most unlikely slopes around the world, even scaling Mount Kilimanjaro -- Kili, as he calls it -- to make a run from the summit: "Skiing at 19,000 feet, I promptly discovered, is exhausting." You betcha.

Issue date: Oct. 4, 1999

Tennis

Dwight Davis: The Man and The Cup
By Nancy Kriplen
Ebury Press, $29.95

In this year, the 100th anniversary of the Davis Cup, Kriplen's impeccably researched biography is a fitting tribute to both Dwight Davis and the competition he founded. A century ago, Davis, then a tennis player at Harvard, was gripped by inspiration as he followed the America's Cup yacht race in the newspapers. Why, he mused, couldn't his sport hold a similar international competition? Before graduating in 1900, he arranged for a team from Britain to compete against a U.S. consortium made up of his Harvard chums. He then forked over about $1,000--serious beer money for a college kid, even by today's standards--to a Boston jeweler for an ornate silver punch bowl and created the International Lawn Tennis Challenge Trophy.

In the inaugural "tie," held in Brookline, Mass., at the old Longwood Cricket Club (the U.S. and Australia will do battle July 16-18 at Longwood, now in Chestnut Hill, Mass.), Davis won his matches in both singles and doubles as the U.S. team crushed Great Britain 3-0. The Brits bemoaned everything from a "continually sagging" net to "abominable" grounds to round balls that became "eggified" balls to serves by the Americans with so much twist as to make them virtually unreturnable. From those modest origins was spawned the annual competition that, having taken Davis's name, now includes 129 nations and has been played on surfaces that include not only the original grass but also wood and cow dung.

Davis's legacy endures through tennis, but his accomplishments, Kriplen illustrates in convincing detail, went well beyond those of a fuzzy, bouncing ball. Davis was an exemplar of noblesse oblige, a man of patrician upbringing who devoted himself to public service. In addition to earning a Distinguished Service Cross for heroism while serving in the Army in World War I, Davis served as President Coolidge's Secretary of War and was President Hoover's governor-general in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, the worldwide tennis event he fashioned grew steadily in prestige. The Cup he purchased as an undergraduate became such a coveted trophy that Hitler was reported to have telephoned German Davis Cup players and to have bid them luck before they took the court. As Davis remarked before he died in 1945 at age 66, "If I had known of [the Cup's] coming significance, it would have been cast in gold."

Though Kriplen's book commits a few unforced errors--it begs, for instance, for more on-court anecdotes from the Davis Cup's textured history--it ultimately succeeds as both a piece of sportswriting and a rich biography. Moreover, the author provides a thorough history of the silver chalice itself, including a play-by-play account of the design and manufacture, down to the engraving, and her work is eminently readable. That, if you'll pardon the pun, might be the book's most sterling achievement.

-- L. Jon Wertheim
Issue date: July 12, 1999

Yact racing

Knockdown
By Martin Dugard
Pocket Books, $24

Almost as big as Everest in publishing these days is the disastrous 1998 Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race. In fact, the "Syd-Hob" is known in Australia as "the Everest of ocean racing" -- with good cause because it is one of the most challenging and dangerous of all outdoor adventures. A total of 115 yachts set sail from Sydney last December, and only 44 reached their destination 735 miles away in the Tasmanian capital. Six sailors were killed, and 57 had to be rescued from the sea as a "weather bomb" with winds up to 90 mph and waves as high as 70 feet clobbered the boats in the navigational "black hole" of Bass Strait. Of the armada of books recounting that terrible time, Dugard's is much the most compelling.

Issue date: Nov. 29, 1999

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