After all, it's only a game

Perhaps better than any other writer Willie Morris can evoke the fleeting era of placid southern summers and simple truths, a halcyon season before television imprisoned our lives. This collection of sports stories, a mixture of fiction and memoir, restores that evanescent time for an hour or so. Each story focuses locally upon details that figure in a larger landscape and in the bigger game. This is a book that not only will entertain but also will open floodgates of memory. "It's about time passing," Morris says, "and about the way a writer looks back on those days. About the vulnerabilities of being young. About the pain and the fear and the adventure - don't leave that out. And about wanting to be a hero, if only for a moment." In these poignant, sometimes rollicking, stories of youth and athletics the games of football, baseball, and basketball provide the arenas for the tests that youth must endure. Morris captures elusive, keenly sensed feelings that rise from recollection and establishes himself in that stream of distinguished American writers whose sports stories illuminate the human conditions of fear, courage, loneliness, and victory in defeat. "Sports were so much apart