About this item
From Jane Leavy, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax, comes the definitive biography of Babe Ruth - the man Roger Angell dubbed "the model for modern celebrity."He lived in the present tense - in the camera's lens. There was no frame he couldn't or wouldn't fill. He swung the heaviest bat, earned the most money, and incurred the biggest fines. He expanded notions of the possible. Like all the new-fangled gadgets then flooding the marketplace - radios, automatic clothes washers, Brownie cameras, microphones and loudspeakers - Babe Ruth "made impossible events happen." Aided by his crucial partnership with Christy Walsh - business manager, spin doctor, damage control wizard, and surrogate father, all stuffed into one tightly buttoned double-breasted suit - Ruth drafted the blueprint for modern athletic stardom.His was a life of journeys and itineraries - from uncouth to couth, impoverished to spendthrift, abandoned to abandon; from Baltimore to Boston to New York, and back to Boston at the end of his career for a finale with the only team that would have him. There were road trips and hunting trips; grand tours of foreign capitals and post-season promotional tours, not to mention those 714 trips around the bases.After hitting his 60th home run in September 1927 - a total that would not be exceeded until 1961, when Roger Maris did it with the aid of the extended modern season - he embarked on the mother of all barnstorming tours, a three-week victory lap across America, accompanied by Yankee teammate Lou Gehrig. This was Babe Ruth's Louisiana Purchase: a star turn through the American heartland, during which he annexed, for Major League Baseball, for the Yankees, and for his own sweet self, uncharted major league territories.Walsh called the tour a "Symphony of Swat." The Omaha World Herald called it "the biggest show since Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey, and seven other associated circuses offered their entire performance under one tent." In The Big Fella, acclaimed biographer Jane Leavy recreates that 21-day circus and in so doing captures the romp and the pathos that defined Ruth's life and times. Drawing from more than 250 interviews, a trove of previously untapped documents, and Ruth family records, Leavy breaks through the mythology that has obscured the legend and delivers the man.The Big Fella includes 32-pages of black-and-white photos and close to 40 black-and-white images throughout.
About the Author
Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestseller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called "the best novel ever written about baseball." She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to1988, first in the sports section, then writing for the style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. She wrote features for the style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including, most memorably, a profile of Mugsy Bogues, the 5'3" guard for the Washington Wizards, which was longer than he is tall. Before joining the The Washington Post, she was a staff writer at womenSports and Self magazines. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, and The New York Daily News. Leavy's work has been anthologized in many collections, including Best Sportswriting, Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, Child of Mine: Essays on Becoming a Mother, Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women, and Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism and Writing. She grew up on Long Island where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. On her parents' first date, her father, a water boy for the 1927 New York football Giants, took her mother to a Brooklyn College football game. She retaliated by taking him to Loehmann's after the final whistle. It was a template for their 63-year union. As a child, Jane Leavy worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel where her grandmother's synagogue held services on the High Holidays.Jane Leavy attended Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she wrote her master's essay (later published in The Village Voice) on Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times, who was her other childhood hero. She has two adult children, Nick and Emma Isakoff, and she lives in Washington, DC, and Truro, Massachusetts.
