Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 01/31/2008

Underscoring why he evoked a unique feeling of disdain and animosity around the NBA, Bill Laimbeer once admitted: "I don't fight. I agitate and walk away."

Birthdays:
Jackie Robinson b. 1919
Hank Aguirre b. 1931
Ernie Banks b. 1931
Camille "the Eel" Henry b. 1933
Nolan Ryan b. 1947

1999:
In what turned out to be the last game of his career, Denver quarterback John Elway racked up 336 passing yards and led the Broncos to their second consecutive Super Bowl triumph, a 34-19 drubbing of Atlanta. Elway was given the game's MVP award.

"The man has always had a flair for the fantastic finish. Had he retired after last season, when he won his first Super Bowl in four tries, despite a lukewarm performance against the Green Bay Packers, Elway's finale would have been heartwarming. If Sunday's game was indeed his last, he will have gone out in a blaze of glory. -Michael Silver, February 8, 1999

MEMOIR

In 1980, Jennie Erdal was a mousy, nerdy, struggling single mother of three, barely making a living in Scotland by translating Boris Pasternak. No one was more surprised than she when she was given a chance—and took it, for 15 years—to exchange this honorable but lackluster life for a tumultuous, highly paid, and morally dubious career as a ghostwriter in London for an improbably colorful publisher called Tiger. The strange dependency that emerges between Erdal and Tiger, and the ghostwriter’s struggle to find her own voice, are almost stranger than fiction.

GHOSTING: A DOUBLE LIFE, by Jennie Erdal (Doubleday, 2005)