“Kennedy’s face had a kind of sweet acceptance to it, the eyes understanding that it had come to him, the way it had come to so many others before him. The price of the attempt at excellence was death”
He had quit high school at sixteen, worked as a sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, joined the navy at seventeen, read and studied to make up the missing years of high school.
“Toward the end, he thought perhaps that he had the perfect heavyweight at last in young Michael Tyson: "I have no doubt he'll be a champion. But more than that, he might be a great fighter”
“New Yorkers don't easily accept ballplayers. They almost always come from somewhere else, itinerants and mercenaries, and most of them are rejected. Those who are accepted seem to have been part of New York forever. Hernandez is one of them”
“The return of the Yankees to the World Series parallels the astonishing changes in the city in the past few years. One thing is very clear: this is a very good time to be in New York.”
