“Listen, Tojo and Hirohito and you Nomuru and you Kurusu, and all the rest of you heathen sons of heaven, you won’t understand this, it’ll be far over your pagan heads, but, even so, you ought to hear about it.”
—C. E. McBride, Kansas City Star, March 27, 1944. Reprinted in Best Sports Stories 1944 (Dutton).

Crew Slammer never made Best Sports Stories. He never got farther than the bulletin board at the Fort Worth Press. He was a victim of the industry, for he collided time and again with the mentality ceiling that bears down on…