And the Crowd Goes Wild: Relive the Most Celebrated Sporting Events Ever Broadcast (Audio+cd-ROM) [With Audio CD]

Following in the footsteps of his own bestselling We Interrupt This Broadcast, radio veteran Garner has put together this gift-perfect compilation of 47 of the most memorable sporting events ever broadcast on radio or TV. This coffee-table-sized volume includes a foreword by Hank Aaron and an afterword by Wayne Gretzky. It also features two accompanying audio CDs that combine sturdy backstory narration of each event by Bob Costas with snippets of the original broadcast. From Babe Ruth's called shot in the 1932 World Series to the U.S. women's 1999 World Cup soccer victory, Garner's collection is a diverse sampling of the century's most significant sporting moments. The book itself benefits from a generous dose of outstanding photographs. The CD set is at once more compelling and more uneven than the text and photos. Some of the events--such as the showdown between Magic Johnson's Michigan State and Larry Bird's Indiana State in the 1979 NCAA basketball finals--were historically important but didn't have any defining, dramatic moments for a sportscaster to sink his teeth into. The best selections combine passionate announcing--Russ Hodges screaming, ""The Giants win the pennant!"" after Bobby Thomson's homer lifted the Giants over the Dodgers in 1951-- with an improbable outcome--like Billy Mills's miraculous run to victory in the 1964 Olympic 10,000 meters--to create a familiar tingle down the spine. (Dec.)