'Going Deep' insightful set of sports stories

GOING DEEP: 20 Classic Sports Stories. By Gary Smith. Sports Illustrated Books. 416 pages. $26.95.

In this uniformly strong collection, Sports Illustrated senior writer and Charleston resident Gary Smith profiles a few of the biggest names in sports — Tiger Woods, Mia Hamm, Andre Agassi — and with his odd-angle take elicits something new and insightful about people we already thought we knew.

He discusses some characters whose stars shone brightly for only a season or two: N.C. State basketball coach Jim Valvano, author of the biggest championship upset in NCAA history; Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, pitching sensation for the 1976 Detroit Tigers; and George O'Leary, whose faked resume forced his resignation at Notre Dame before he'd coached a single football game.

But Smith's at his best constructing always interesting, frequently affecting portraits of unknowns, cementing his reputation as the favorite sportswriter of folks increasingly disillusioned by the tawdriness of big-time athletics. Sports serve only as the backdrop to larger stories of struggle, achievement and tragedy when Smith turns to the likes of John Malangone, whose childhood trauma got in the way of his "can't miss" baseball career, or Lez Hiner, who used the unlikely sport of polo to rescue any number of inner-city Philadelphia kids.

Ever hear of Rob Jones, the San Francisco high school basketball star whose name barely disguises his relationship to Jonestown and, yes, that Jim Jones? Or Jonathan Takes Enemy, who simultaneously embodied the hoop dreams and nightmares of Montana's Crow reservation? It's likely only because of the movie based on Smith's story that you know Radio, the mentally disabled boy virtually adopted by T.L. Hanna High's football community more than 30 years ago.

But then, each of these profiles is movie-worthy, so much that no two readers will agree on a favorite in this superb compendium.