Latrell Sprewell, Allen Iverson, John McEnroe, Even Mohammed Ali and Mike Schmidt and Michael Jordan - these are characters of our national imagination, athletes who stand as symbols of our complex relationship with professional sport. In this erudite and captivating book, bestselling author Larry Platt takes us on a tour through American sports. Offering profiles of the athletes we love (and love to hate), Platt shows that sport, more than any other nationwide pastime, is the way we come to understand and alter race relations, gender, and, most profoundly, how we communicate with each other...

Offering profiles of the athletes we love, this book shows how they live their lives and how we live out and define American culture by the way we come to understand their lives in and out of the halls of play.

Long-time fans of the National Pastime have known Moyer's name for more than 25 years. That's because he's been pitching in the bigs for all those years.
With his trademark three pitches - slow, slower, and slowest - the left-handed Moyer is a pinpoint specialist whose won-lost record actually got better as he got older -- from his 20s to his 30s and into 40s. He's only a few wins shy of 300 for his amazing career.
But this is where the book takes an unusual turn. Moyer was just about finished as a big leaguer in his mid-20s until he fatefully encountered a gravel-voiced, highly...