Author Description

"It sounds just like a movie. A father carves up his farmland to provide a baseball field where he can teach his young son to play. That son blossoms, moves straight from the farm to the major leagues at the tender age of seventeen, and dominates hitters from the outset with a blazing fastball. By the time his career ends, this athlete is unquestionably the best pitcher of the World War II generation." "Yet Bob Feller's legacy has faded. Fans today still talk of his peers Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, but the Feller mystique, once just as strong, is rarely discussed. John Sickels has changed that, providing the first serious biography of a complicated and controversial man." "From the moment he signed his first professional contract, Bob Feller in turn both charmed and alienated his teammates, fans, and the media. He was an unabashed patriot who enlisted in the Navy the day after Pearl Harbor and was a remarkably successful businessman who organized lucrative winter barnstorming tours. Within those tours, he became one of the first and strongest advocates of integrating the game." "However, he also had a combative relationship with Jackie Robinson that served to tarnish that component of his legacy. Despite being the highest-paid player in the game for much of his career, family problems helped produce a financial catastrophe after his playing days. And he rubbed both fans and the media the wrong way with his bluntly expressed opinions." "In this portrait of the controversial superstar, Sickels looks at all sides of Bob Feller and looks at him within the context of his era. He squares Feller's All-American image with the darker side of his personality that some have seen and reveals the man underlying the legend. Both the totally positive and extremely negative images of Feller contain some elements of truth, but without taking them together they provide an incomplete picture. Sickels presents the complete Bob Feller - his career and his personality - and reintroduces baseball fans to the ace of "the greatest generation.""--Jacket.