Excellent... The chapters on Muhammad Ali are delightful, and Ali is not easy to write about

Time

With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered

Guardian

What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton’s continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale… A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert... It is a fan’s book, not only displaying the awe and devotional piety of the true fan but also the perils of the condition.

- Timothy O'Grady, Times Literary Supplement