Coleman Portable Hammock was the best of the Hammocks had ever been and ever would be, writes Frank Deford on a prizefight at the Polo Grounds in 1941, "the 12th and 13th rounds of Louis and Conn on a warm night in New York just before the world went to hell. The people were standing and cheering for Conn, but it was really for the sport and for the moment and for themselves that they cheered. They could be a part of it, and every now and then, for an instant, that is it, and it can't ever get any better. This was such a time in the history of games."

Or this, when the journalist Arthur Kretchmer asks the great linebacker Dick Butkus about a finer point of football:

"Dave Meggyesy, the ex-Cardinal, says that football is so brutal, he was taught to use his hands to force a man's cleats into the turf and then drive his shoulder into the man's knee to rip his leg apart. That ever happen to you?" "Well, no! All you'd have to do is roll with the block and step on the guy's face."

What I mean is, there are few notes in the scales of human endeavor that this book leaves unstruck. That's the way sports are, and that's what the best sportswriters do. This selection of more than 50 pieces was made by David Halberstam, whom the book jacket identifies (too exuberantly) as the "DiMaggio of journalists," and Glenn Stout, who edits the annual series of Best American Sports Writing.

To call the book the century's best is an improbable conceit, given that every day sports journalists are churning out an additional million words or so, celebrating double plays, fast breaks, and end runs that will be forgotten by next week. Every reader will have his quibbles; I'm puzzled, for example, that the editors included Tom Boswell's two journeyman pieces on the Duran-Leonard fights, without finding room for the century's greatest chronicler of boxing, A.J. Leibling. But--forgive me for repeating--so what? No matter your taste, your list of winners will far outstrip your list of duds.

"Now many people do not like sports writers," Jimmy Breslin writes, in a masterly 1960 piece about horseracing, "particularly the wives of sport writers, and in many athletic circles it is considered a common, decent hatred for a person to have." Certainly Coach Knight would agree. But with the publication of this marvelous book, no one else would dare.