Story days: highlights from four decades covering sports - dan barry

In the 1980s, the world of sports was undergoing phenomenal change.

No longer confined to the back pages of newspapers, sports were turning into a mega-business, an industry as much as a past-time that soon came to dominate American culture.

Award-winning author and Providence Journal columnist, Bill Reynolds, saw it all.

Story Days , a collection of Bills columns spanning the last 40 years, documents this evolution in sports.

With an eye for the offbeat, unusual access to some of the biggest names in sports and a willingness to travel to out-of-the-way places to get his story, Bill captured the changing times with depth, humor and verve.

No topic was off-limits for Bill, who wrote about the tragedies and social issues that arose under the umbrella of sports, as well as its successes and joy.

Story Days includes famous sports figures, but the less well known also appear, either because their stories were so poignant or because they reveal a side of sports seldom seen.

This is the side where athletes dont always win, they dont always get rich and they dont always achieve their dreams.

What happens when the dream dies or is thwarted? What happens to the athlete then? These were the sort of questions that drove Bills singular outlook on the people he talked to over the years, people justly remembered in Story Days .