The rascally Riggs; humble horse players; ailing but brave boxers

By Bill Littlefield, 9/7/2003

The Last Sure Thing: The Life and Times of Bobby Riggs, By Tom LeCompte, Black Squirrel, 471 pp., illustrated, $29.95

Almost 30 years ago -- Sept. 20, 1973, to be precise -- Bobby Riggs walked confidently onto a temporary court on the floor of the Houston Astrodome, waved to the largest crowd ever to witness a tennis match, and fell on his face. His match with Billie Jean King was unremarkable for the tennis it provided but exceptional for its consequences within and beyond sports, and if the 30th anniversary of King-Riggs awakens in you some flicker of curiosity about what made the old hustler tick, Tom LeCompte, the author of "The Last Sure Thing: The Life and Times of Bobby Riggs," will be delighted.

Riggs, a winner of championships in his prime, never grew up. He happily acknowledged that fact. He was a ridiculously irresponsible husband and father. But as LeCompte found when he began talking to people who'd known Riggs, "everybody seemed to have a favorite story about Bobby." Of such discoveries are entertaining biographies made. (It's worth mentioning that none of the publishers LeCompte approached with that conviction bought the idea. He published "The Last Sure Thing" himself. Readers will be grateful for his determination and his confidence in the enterprise.)

Betting on Myself: Adventures of a Horseplayer and Publisher, By Steven Crist, Daily Racing Form, 228 pp., $24.95

With "Betting On Myself: Adventures of a Horseplayer and Publisher," Steven Crist has lapped most of the autobiographers connected to a game. Crist, publisher of the Daily Racing Form, is an exceptional storyteller, and it will surprise nobody who has spent more than about 15 minutes at the track to learn that he has some fine stories to tell. Consider, for example, the day he hit the pick six for more than $160,000 and still managed to maintain that, "strange as it may sound, playing the pick six never seemed primarily about the money."

Beyond the tales of fortunes (and publications) won, wagered, lost, and won again, Crist includes in "Betting On Myself" evidence that the humble horse player is being played for a sucker by the state and federal governments, as well as by the racetrack. He points out that "no other business enterprise or form of income in the world" is so illegitimately diminished and so heavily taxed as one's winnings at the track, and notes that when he tried to point out this injustice to his "former colleagues on the New York Times editorial page, they would chuckle and respond that the cash-flow problems of gamblers were hardly a legitimate public policy concern (as opposed to, say, capital gains tax breaks for wealthy financiers)."

Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, By Carlo Rotella, Houghton Mifflin, 240 pp., $24

The title of Carlo Rotella's "Cut Time" comes from that moment during a prize fight when "blood from a serious cut finds its way into the lights." "You can almost hear it," Rotella writes, "a droning almost-music that hangs in the smoke-filled air of fight night, strumming the optic nerves and vibrating in the teeth, encouraging fighters to do urgent, sometimes desperate things."

Though he recognizes that the majority of prize fights are mismatches designed to draw a crowd rather than legitimate athletic contests and acknowledges that "this kind of predictable futility can get depressing," Rotella finds in boxing not only entertainment, but worthy and sustaining metaphors for battles outside the ring. In some of the most extraordinary passages of this thoughtful and crafted book, Rotella compares the proud struggles of old and damaged boxers to his grandmother's determined progress through her final days.

Nor is "Cut Time" without humor of a sort. Rotella traces his fascination with boxing to a bar fight he watched when he was in college, a ridiculously one-sided bout in which a middle-aged, potbellied working man who knew how to box hammered three hulking, smart-ass students, one of whom was nicknamed "the Henchman." "The back of the Henchman's blond head bounced hard off the window," Rotella writes, "making a rich, thrumming boom that profoundly impressed the spectators inside, who exchanged odd confirmatory glances, as if earlier in the evening they had been discussing what it sounds like when somebody's head bounces off plate glass without breaking it."

Yankees Century: 100 Years of New York Yankees Baseball, By Glenn Stout, Houghton Mifflin, 496 pp., illustrated, $35

Lest I be accused of perversity in failing to mention a baseball book as the elements of the next Fall Classic begin to assemble themselves, consider seriously Glenn Stout's "Yankees Century." Like it or not, Boston, no franchise has generated a greater variety of stories or personalities than the Yankees, and Stout's assembly of them is thorough and delightful. The volume is also peppered with the essays of such worthies as Ring Lardner and David Halberstam. No matter what the standings look like at the end of the baseball season, here are stories (and photographs) to help baseball lovers through the winter.

For WBUR, Bill Littlefield hosts National Public Radio's weekly sports program, "Only a Game." His most recent book is a novel, "The Circus in the Woods," from Houghton Mifflin.