Describes memorable moments in sports, including baseball, boxing, football, basketball, and hockey, and shares the corresponding radio broadcasts What baseball fan doesn't get goosebumps when hearing, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!" Who--hockey fan or not--doesn't feel a little bit giddy whenever they hear Al Michaels shout, "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" Who doesn't grin when they hear Univision sportscaster Andres Cantor demonstrate his lung capacity by bellowing, "Gooooaaaal!" And who can forget "The Play" in the Cal vs. Stanford game when the Bears came back to win in the final seconds--bowling over a trombone player in the process? From an admittedly scratchy recording of Babe Ruth's memorable World Series home run in 1932 to the dramatic penalty shootout win in the 1999 Women's World Cup, And the Crowd Goes Wild captures history's greatest sports calls. The two CDs accompanying this collection feature 47 original sports calls, including Franco Harris making the "Immaculate Reception," Secretariat winning the Triple Crown, Lou Gehrig saying goodbye, Buster Douglas upsetting Mike Tyson, and Mark McGwire beating Roger Maris's single-season home run record. The book sets up each event with capsule explanations, accompanied by stock photographs. Narrated by Bob Costas, And the Crowd Goes Wild will entertain any sports fan. --Sunny Delaney Assembled by Garner (We Interrupt This Broadcast), this book-and-CD set, is an excellent concept. The text and plentiful photographs in the book provide background for the broadcast calls presented on the two CDs of celebrated sports events, from Babe Ruth's "called" shot to Brandi Chastain's winning penalty kick. Each call on the CDs is further set up by announcer Bob Costas's narration. The execution, however, raises questions. The selections themselves are idiosyncraticAwhy include obscurities like Billy Mills's Olympic gold medal, for instanceAand heavily weighted toward recent times (85 percent of the events are post-1960, 60 percent are post-1970). More troubling is that some events are more conducive to short clips than others. There is no climactic moment to relive in the Jets' upset win in Super Bowl III, so the clip is of little interest although the event was certainly noteworthy. Furthermore, not all the broadcasters are equally compelling, so some clips of exciting finishes are fairly dry. Finally, it would have been nice if the narration and the calls had been arranged on separate tracks because when going back for a second time, a listener might want to skip Costas's fine narration and just listen to the original call. Despite these caveats, the concept is unique enough to recommend this book for all general sports collections.AJohn M. Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, NJ Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Joe Garner is the New York Times bestselling author of We Interrupt This Broadcast and is a twenty-year veteran of the radio business, including eleven years as an executive with Westwood One. His expertise on the media's coverage of major events has been featured on Weekend Today, CNN, CBS Up-to-the-Minute and hundreds of radio programs nationwide. We Interrupt This Broadcast was also a bestseller in the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly and USA Today. Bob Costas holds twelve Emmy awards--eight as outstanding sports broadcaster, two for writing, one for his late night interview show Later...with Bob Costas and one for his play-by-play broadcast of the 1997 World Series. He has been named "National Sportscaster of the Year" seven times by his peers. He has been with NBC Sports since 1979 and has covered every major sport, including the Olympics. Costas is a frequent contributor to NBC as a reporter and interviewer on the network's primetime news magazines. from the Introduction In the history of sports, there are a few events that are legendary, identifiable by a simple two- or three-word phrase or even a single number: "The Called Shot," "The Catch," "The Hail Mary," "The Immaculate Reception" and "Number 715." Just mention these to any sports fan worth their TV remote and subscription to Sports Illustrated and they know where they were when they saw it or heard about it. This book and CD compilation is a collection of magical moments from this hallowed category of events. They are spine-tingling outcomes: the buzzer beaters, the last-second goals, the stunning upsets, the come-from-behind victories. Moreover, this collection tells the stories behind them. These are moments that we hold in such regard and remember with such clarity, it's as if they happened only yesterday.... This book is also a tribute to the sportscasters, the play-by-play guys, the storytellers in the booth who give voice to our exhilaration in victory and to our disappointment in defeat. It may be my broadcasting background, but I believe that a large part of why we remember these extraordinary athletic moments is due to