Searching For Heroes

At the cutting edge of sport, where winners go one way and losers the other, Ian Wooldridge made his living as a journalist. His shrewd eye went straight to the heart of sports pressure situations, unerringly detecting courage in the competitors, and raising the spirits of his readers with his celebration of genuine heroism. His style was at one and the same time convulsively amusing and acidic. He saw the funny side, yet he was merciless in his search for the truth. SEARCHING FOR HEROES includes his articles on his heroes - including Mohammed Ali, Shane Warne and George Best - as well as articles on events and personalities that were on the receiving end of his more acerbic commentaries. Wooldridge brought back to modern sports journalism a polish, an intelligence and an idealism that had become somewhat tarnished. These qualities made him so much more than a press room scribbler, a routine writer who just asks his mates for the turning point in the match, phones in his copy and thinks, sod it, its only a game. To Ian Wooldridge it was more than a game. It was a life.