Powerful stories about the way sports can bring together fathers and sons, to work out their differences and express their love for each other. Fathers & Sons & Sports presents a powerful lineup of real-world stories about fathers and sons playing one-on-one in the game of life, written by such great sportswriters and authors as Henry Aaron, as told to Cal Fussman • Michael J. Agovino • Buzz Bissinger • Jeff Bradley • John Ed Bradley • James Brown • Darcy Frey • Tom Friend • Bill Geist • Mike Golic • Donald Hall • Paul Hoffman • Mark Kriegel • Norman Maclean • John Buffalo Mailer • Ron Reagan • Peter Richmond • Jeremy Schaap • Lew Schneider • Dan Shaughnessy • Paul Solotaroff • John Jeremiah Sullivan • Wright Thompson • Steve Wulf The unforgettable accounts here include the stories of a professional football player passing on his father’ s secrets to his own sons, a severely disabled boy discovering joy on a surfboard, a wealthy NFL player taking his coddled children back to the mean streets that made him, and a major league manager who must face the hard fact that nothing, not even unconditional love, can save his son. Anyone who has ever been a father or a son will see himself in these moving snapshots of family life at its most emotional. Whether the stories take place on a diamond, a court, a gridiron, a fairway, or a chessboard, they’re all about the same subject: fatherhood, one of the world’s most intriguing sports. Mike Lupica , a nationally known columnist for the New York Daily News, has written books for both fathers and sons. His first two novels for young readers, Travel Team and Heat, reached # 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Lupica is also a Sunday morning regular on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters. He lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, with his wife, Taylor, and their four children. Introduction  MIKE LUPICA   My dad first took me into the room, welcomed me into the company of sports,when I was six.  He had long since completed all the preliminaries, patiently teaching me the rules of baseball, buying me my first bat and glove, giving me a cut-off five-iron and showing me how to grip it, taking me to the park next door to our house and watching as I finally, and with everything I had, managed to heave a basketball to the rim for the first time. But it was on the day the Giants played the Colts in 1958– the first sudden-death championship game in NFL history, the one that made pro football a big television attraction in this country–that I joined the conversation.  We lived in upstate New York at the time. There was no American Football League, no DirecTV,no NFL Sunday Ticket, no thought even given to letting people watch any matchup they wanted on Sunday afternoon. For me, there was just one game: The football Giants. And now they had beaten Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns, and they were going up against Johnny Unitas’s Colts for the title. So this Sunday was different. I wasn’t just watching with my dad. All of my uncles were there as well. Just like that, I was in. So many things have changed for me in the life I’ve been lucky to lead since that day in December 1958, but one thing remains the same: There is no game I am watching that I wouldn’t rather be watching with my dad. The best days I’ve had in sports, either in front of a TV screen or at the ballpark,were shared with my dad and my three sons.  (And just for the record:My nine-year-old daughter? When she occasionally sits with me and asks questions about a game I am watching–usually with her brothers out of the room, usually a baseball game–it is a joy of my life. But this is a book about fathers and sons and sports. I’m just doing my job here!) The first great day was December 28, 1958, Alan Ameche going into the end zone in overtime, sports breaking my heart for the first time.  I remember that play. I remember a big fumble from Frank Gifford. I remember Unitas’s near perfection, never missing a receiver or a throw. The rest of it is a blur.What I know now about the game I have filled in over the years: Raymond Berry’s catches, the big catch Jim Mutscheller made,Lenny Moore’s running, and the plays that Chuckin’ Charlie Conerly made for the Giants. Because it was such an iconic game I have, over time, been able to remember what I had forgotten. ESPN Classic will do that for you.  What I have never forgotten and never will forget is the magic in the room as I sat on the couch next to my father.The excitement of it all.The air in the room.  My friend Seymour Siwoff, who founded the Elias Sports Bureau, once described sports as you talking about a moment and me talking about the same moment and the air in between us. I remember sitting next to my dad and I remember that air. There was no formal announcement, no rite of initiation. It was as if my dad took me by the hand and we entered this world together, the world of shared memories and a shared language and all the things, good and bad, that