Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE, VOL. 1: 1904-1939 by Norman Sherry (Viking; $29.95). Greene may be the most elusive big fish still swimming in the shrinking pond of English letters, but this fascinating, obsessively detailed biography hooks him solidly. Hardly a question about the author goes unanswered, and Greene's best years, those of The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, are yet to come...
Since the celluloid Gipper has repaired to California and the call to win things for him has happily left the language, maybe it is not too impolite now to remember that the real George Gipp of Notre Dame was a low-life gambler who openly bet on his own football games and everything else from cards and craps to flies landing on sugar cubes. Gipp seldom attended class and only occasionally graced football practice. The sentimental writer Red Smith, a Notre Dame man himself, used to refer to the great dead hero as "the patron saint of eight-ball pool...
...down on the streptococci. Myths, legends and lies are the beams and girders of games, but isn't it a bit much the way the country has been getting ready to be appalled by Pete Rose? O.K., he's a plunger. Everyone knows gambling pervades sports. It pervades life...
Doug Moe, the flamboyant coach of the Denver Nuggets, got to thinking a few weeks ago that pro basketball shouldn't let Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slip into retirement without somebody standing up and saying what a "jerk" the Laker center had been "his whole life." Abdul-Jabbar let it go, but the obvious rejoinder, if he remembered the headlines of 1961, was to say at least he never accepted carfare from a fixer for listening to the pitch. That was Moe's only confessed involvement in a point-shaving mess at the University of North Carolina, but it was enough...
...Robinson, he might have been taken for an elder statesman of boxing, a figure of charm and standing. As a matter of fact, when Robinson made a Spanish omelet out of LaMotta in 1951, the New York Herald Tribune called it "the first believable knockout of ((Jake's)) life." LaMotta swears he never took a dive except the one against Blackjack Billy Fox, and that was so long...