Read the beginning of the Introduction from Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand: Portraits of Champions Who Walked Among Us by John Schulian:

"In an age when it seems that no royal perk is enough for the athletes who have been crowned our heroes, the helicopter that whisks Kobe Bryant to the Lakers’ home games strikes me as more practical than self-indulgent. After all, the drive from his manse can take as long as two hours, even in a Lamborghini. What better reason to fly over the traffic jams that snarl the sprawling mess of Los Angeles, where his name and likeness are indelible in every subdivision and strip mall? L.A. is his kingdom, and a kingdom must be a hard thing to ignore when it is yours, but still I hope Kobe looks beyond it once in a while. I hope he looks until he sees the past.

He might get a glimpse of Steve Van Buren, the Philadelphia Eagles’ fourteen-karat halfback, waking up one Sunday morning in 1948 and pulling back the curtain to discover that a blizzard had buried the city. The Eagles were supposed to play for the nfl championship that day, but Van Buren thought it would never happen, not with snow up to the rooftops, so he jumped back into bed. A phone call from his coach, Greasy Neale, coaxed him out again. There would indeed be a game. How Van Buren got to it from his suburban home was his problem. He couldn’t extricate his car from his garage, so, like many another wage slave, he climbed aboard a trolley car, transferred to the subway, and walked the last seven blocks to Shibe Park.

The snow on the tarpaulin covering the field was so heavy that the Eagles and the Chicago Cardinals had to help the grounds crew roll it to the sideline. In action at last, Van Buren defied treacherous footing and nonexistent visibility to score the game’s only touchdown. Then he celebrated the Eagles’ championship by walking back to the subway and riding it to where he could catch the trolley home.

And there you have the difference between yesterday’s heroes and today’s: Van Buren’s trolley and Kobe’s ’copter.

There, too, is the inspiration for this book.

It is a cross-section of newspaper columns and magazine stories I wrote about the last heroes who at least gave the impression that they walked among us. I want to offer proof that they actually existed for both the fans who cheered them and the writers who chronicled their exploits. The heroes the press anointed could be irascible — one of my contemporaries got stuffed in a trashcan, another thrown in a swimming pool — but enough questions were answered for human beings to emerge from behind the headlines."