This book is great if you love sports. Rather, this book is great if you love watching ESPN, which is not the same thing. Shales does the same basic trick he did with the SNL book -- interviews anyone who had anything to do wit the subject, and strings the interview quotes into a story, with a few bits of exposition tucked in here and there. That sounds easy, but making it all come out coherently, with some semblance of order, must have been a monumental task, and my hat is off to him.

That said, my god man, hire an editor. The book is roughly 76,522 pages long, or at least it felt that way. While the backroom stuff about personalities and office politics is fascinating, the wheeling and dealing among Getty/Cap Cities/ABC etc. is much less so. It almost needs to be two books: one focusing on the financial side and one on the editorial. And he does slide a bit into the hagiography mode, especially towards the end.

The people you expect to come off badly (Olbermann, Kilborn, Kornheiser), come off very badly, although I was surprised to see how obnoxious Bill Simmons comes across. And really, there is *no* way to justify the LeBron "Decision," no matter how hard Jim Gray tries.