President Reagan and the three former American presidents sent flowers, as did people as diverse as Bob Hope, ABC's Roone Arledge, advice columnist Ann Landers and the Reverend Billy Graham. Scores of Bryant's former players, including Joe Namath, Lee Roy Jordan, Ken Stabler and Ozzie Newsome, were in attendance. So were Bryant's most distinguished colleagues, the greatest living football coaches, including Southern Cal's John McKay, who said, "It was like a presidential funeral procession. No coach in America could have gotten that. No coach but him. But then, he wasn't just a coach. He was...

In a follow-up to his "Clearing the Bases""Sports Illustrated s" book of the year for 2002syndicated columnist Allen Barra turns his eye from America s pastime to America s passion. In this collection of essays, Barra delves into the gridiron s all-time greats, some of the sport s enduring controversies, and suggests new ways to think about the game that holds our attention from August through January, every year. Barra turns his aggressively intelligent writing to the Heisman Trophy and its controversies and demonstrates why the Bowl Championship Series has not and cannot work. He explains...

In a follow-up to his Clearing the Bases--Sports Illustrated's book of the year for 2002--syndicated columnist Allen Barra turns his eye from America's pastime to America's passion. In this collection of essays, Barra delves into the gridiron's all-time greats, some of the sport's enduring controversies, and suggests new ways to think about the game that holds our attention from August through January, every year.Barra turns his aggressively intelligent writing to the Heisman Trophy and its controversies and demonstrates why the Bowl Championship Series has not and cannot work....

On October 26, 1881, Wyatt Earp, his two brothers, and Doc Holliday shot it out with a gang of cattle rustlers near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. It was over in half a minute, but those thirty violent seconds turned the thirty-three-year-old Wyatt Earp into the stuff of legend.
In truth, however, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral neither launched nor climaxed a career that in the course of eighty-two colorful years took Wyatt Earp from an Iowa farm to the movie studios of Hollywood, where he worked as an advisor on Western films. Along the way he saw real-life action as a buffalo...

Allen Barra has journeyed to his native Alabama to capture the glories of a century of baseball lore. In chronicling Rickwood Field's history, he also tells of segregated baseball and the legendary Negro Leagues while summoning the ghosts of the players themselves --Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Ted Willians, and Willie Mays -- who still haunt baseball's oldest Cathedral. But Rickwood Field, a place where the Ku Klux Klan once held rallies, has now become a symbol of hope and triumph, a stadium that reflects the evolution of a city where baseball was, for...

Acclaimed sportswriter Allen Barra exposes the uncanny parallels--and lifelong friendship--between two of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field.
Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor. Both were nearly crushed by the weight...