SEASON’S READINGS : A Fan’s Christmas

Frank Thomas’ miraculous baseball triple crown and Wayne Gretzky’s pursuit of yet another scoring title--that’s what sports fans should be discussing these days. Obstinate (OK, greedy) owners instead have reduced us to athletic co-dependents in recovery, taping monster truck pulls and waking early to watch Division II football (Depauw at Wabash with breakfast) in a futile attempt to shake our box-score D.T.’s.

The baseball strike and the hockey lockout make the flood of new sports books--particularly those whose vivid prose transports us to the stadium, arena or links--more appealing than usual. Unless, of course, you’ve given up on sports entirely.

Many of the “new” baseball books this Christmas are in fact older works with fresh paint jobs and should be avoided (two dated Daniel Okrent reprints try to cash in on his appearance on TV’s recent “Baseball”). Two other 1994 titles, though, are worthy.

William Brashler’s The Story of Negro League Baseball is one such volume and a good gift, especially for young fans. Geared for teen readers, the book adeptly mixes light social commentary with lively sports history. There’s little new here, but Brashler has fun. Tracking the era’s top stars, he smartly does not skip the best personalities and wackiest (and often saddest) stories. Among them: Blocked from signing black players, big-league manager John McGraw insisted Negro League second baseman Charlie Grant was actually a Cherokee Indian named Chief Tokohama. The idea flopped.

Shadows of Summer: Classic Baseball Photographs 1869-1947 is filled with several pictures so artistic and emotional Dorothea Lange could have snapped them. There’s a great shot of a contemplative Honus Wagner picking over bats, and a hilarious picture of a muscle-bound Jimmie Foxx squeezing Ted Williams’ scrawny arms. Donald Honig’s text is engaging, too. He tells why Brooklyn Dodger manager Wilbert Robinson never played Val Picinich: Robinson didn’t know how to spell the catcher’s name on a lineup card.

Golf course architect Pete Dye’s anecdotal Bury Me in a Pot Bunker follows recent, similar works by designers Tom Doak and Robert Trent Jones Jr. and compares favorably. Dye’s 17th hole at the Stadium Course at TPC is arguably the most famous par-3 in North America behind Cypress Point’s ocean-carrying 16th. Designing the island green at TPC was almost accidental, Dye writes, but more interesting was the PGA tour’s reaction to the intimidating hole and the course. After a round on the par-eating track, Fuzzy Zoeller asked, “Where are the windmills and animals?” Jack Nicklaus whined: “I’ve never been very good at stopping a five-iron on the hood of a car.”

Nicklaus may be golf’s greatest ever, yet it was the more handsome Arnold Palmer who brought water hazards and dog-legs into the popular vocabulary. Arnold Palmer: A Personal Journey is a fine, well-illustrated account of golf’s first matinee hero. With go-for-broke shots and horrific swings (lunges, actually), the gallery-friendly Palmer gave hope to all those hackers whose game never came within a fairway of competency but who enjoyed golf nonetheless. Biographer Thomas Hauser doesn’t ignore Palmer’s famous collapses, and his retelling of the Palmer-Nicklaus rivalry is the book’s best section.

Sportswriter Grantland Rice missed Palmer’s ascent, but he was there for Bobby Jones and his generation’s stars: Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden and Knute Rockne among them. The informative but overly academic biography by Mark Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s chronicles that time when athletes emerged as larger-than-life icons. Everything was a little overblown: It was Rice who dubbed the Notre Dame football backfield “The Four Horsemen” and called Red Grange the “Galloping Ghost.” Writing before television could show the public how good star performers really were, Rice reeled off superlatives with abandon: Jack Dempsey hit harder than any boxer “in all the history of the ring, dating back to days beyond all memory.” Even with time’s advantage, it’s still arguable whether Rice was a wordsmith or a heavy-handed hack. He did leave a legacy, though, including the frequently repeated phrase, “(It’s) not that you won or lost--but how you played the game.”

“A lot of crap” is how Red Auerbach characterized Rice’s paean to good sportsmanship. As memorialized by Dan Shaugnessy in Seeing Red: The Red Auerbach Story, the Boston Celtics coach and general manager comes across equally shrewd and crude. Despite his many successes and innovations, he was as fair-minded as his contempt for Rice would suggest: Auerbach’s accomplishments suffer from a basic lack of decency. Sadly, he’s now an archetype of good management.

“Red’s ethics were those of convenience,” Shaugnessy writes evenhandedly. Indeed: Auerbach opposed the NBA’s drafting college underclassmen--until he wanted to pick freshman Ralph Sampson, encouraging him to quit Virginia at age 18. Auerbach believed contracts should be honored, but he wanted to bust Danny Ainge’s baseball deal so he could play Celtic basketball. Pat Riley accurately sums up Auerbach’s unspoken credo: “To hell with dignity. To hell with fair play.”

Compared to basketball and baseball, professional football has not contributed much to sports libraries. A Game of Passion: The NFL Literary Companion tries to change that anemic record with spotty results. The volume mixes the gridiron musings of Don DeLillo and a young Gay Talese (and several other prominent authors) with the stories of more predictable sportswriters such as Jim Murray and Paul Zimmerman. Most of the pieces aren’t terribly new, and many aren’t terribly good, either. Since when do the words “by John Madden” and “literary” belong in the same document?

You’re Okay, It’s Just a Bruise doesn’t showcase much better writing but it’s certainly more riveting reading. The memoir of Los Angeles Raiders internist Robert Huizenga is often lurid and rarely dull. Marked by prescription painkillers consumed by the handful and rampant steroid abuse, Huizenga’s world is violent and not always palatable. The inventory of Lyle Alzado’s frightening medicine chest is exceeded by the story of lineman Mike Wise, whose muscle-building chemical intake pushed his forehead bones to “Neanderthal” proportions. Plastic surgery cured that side effect, but only suicide ended Wise’s mental anguish. “It’s Just a Bruise” is a useful counterpoint to overly romantic notions of the NFL, and a good reminder of how fans’ expectations don’t always match the realities of professional sports.

THE STORY OF NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL, by William Brashler (Ticknor & Fields: $15.95 cloth, $10.95 paper; 166 pp.)

SHADOWS OF SUMMER: Classic Baseball Photographs 1869-1947, text by Donald Honig (Viking Studio Books: $60; 182 pp.)

BURY ME IN A POT BUNKER, by Pete Dye (Addison-Wesley: $23; 304 pp.)

ARNOLD PALMER: A Personal Journey, by Thomas Hauser (Collins San Francisco: $40; 192 pp.)

GRANTLAND RICE AND HIS HEROES: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s, by Mark Inabinett (University of Tennessee: $28 cloth, $14 paper; 176 pp.)

SEEING RED: The Red Auerbach Story, by Dan Shaugnessy (Crown Publishers: $22; 320 pp.)

A GAME OF PASSION: The NFL Literary Companion, (Turner Publishing: $10.95; 448 pp.)

YOU’RE OKAY IT’S JUST A BRUISE, by Robert Huizenga (St. Martin’s Press: $22.95; 336 pp.)

Also Keep in Mind:

A KIND OF GRACE: A Treasure of Sports Writing by Women, edited by Ron Rapoport (Zenobia Press: 2415 Woolsey St., Berkeley, Calif. 94705, (510 - 644-1133); $14.95; 385 pp.)