The Poet: The Life and Los Angeles Times of Jim Murray - Hardcover

"Comedian Fred Allen said that California was a great place to live if you're an orange. It also became a great place if you loved prose told by a man who knew, to paraphrase Churchill, that words are bullets the writer uses as ammunition. That man was Jim Murray. As Steven Travers recounts, Murray moved sports' media center to the West Coast. He also moved beyond balls and strikes into business, politics, and culture, using language as beautifully as Jascha Heifetz played a violin."--Curt Smith, author of Voices of the Game: The Acclaimed Chronicle of Baseball Radio and Television Broadcasting and Pull Up a Chair: The Vin Scully Story--Curt Smith

Forget Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and the others. Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times was not merely the best writer but the single greatest sports columnist who ever lived - fullstop. Known for his highly descriptive metaphors and phrasing - i.e "a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart" - Murray was a poet. Steven Travers provides an in-depth look at a man whose influence went far beyond the baseball diamond and the boxing ring.