W.K. Stanton is receiving his praise for his new book on boxer Floyd Patterson.

From the Wall Street Journal:

It is a puzzle how this boxer ever managed to climb to the top of a brutal game. W.K. Stratton’s first-rate Patterson biography attempts to solve the riddle of the most ambivalent of modern gladiators—one who would rush to lift his knockout victims off the canvas and who once even stopped in mid-round to help an opponent find his mouthpiece.

Deadspin ran an excerpt from the book. Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt:

This was Moore’s cue. He rose to his feet and began a blistering verbal attack on Patterson as the cameras rolled and the sportswriters scribbled notes. Patterson was completely taken aback. He believed in treating the opposition with dignity. There was nothing dignified about the words spewing from Moore’s mouth. Finally, Patterson could stand it no longer. He fled the room and hurried through the lobby and out onto the street, where he sucked in some deep breaths of fresh air.

He found a pay phone, called Sandra, and poured his heart out. She was always effective in those days at calming him down. But now he had even more reason to check in with her. Sandra was pregnant and their baby was due to arrive about the same time as the heavyweight title fight. Sandra directed the conversation to the soon-to-arrive baby and how she herself was feeling. She soothed his anger over Moore’s tirade.

Patterson returned to the hotel and completed the interview, although he was irked by later questions about how he planned to stand up against a fighter with Moore’s decades of experience. Floyd believed that he’d learned as much in a short time as Moore had learned over many years, but no boxing prognosticators seemed to consider that possibility.

I finally heard back from Simon & Schuster about my post wondering why the Paterno book is receiving limited play on its site.

In an email, Kelly Welsh, S&S senior publicity manager said:

“Joe Posnanski’s book will be featured on S&S.com home page when it officially goes on-sale next Tuesday, and it will be featured in a newsletter which will go out at the end of the month.”

I followed up by asking if a book tour is planned and if Posnanski would be making any appearances. Welsh replied: “He’s appearing in Kansas City on 9/12.”

Posnanski was a long-time columnist in Kansas City.

Given the magnitude of the book, one appearance is nothing. It speaks to the uncertainty of how the public will receive a book on the tarnished coach. With the backlash so extreme, S&S apparently doesn’t want to risk putting Posnanski out there.

Again, I’m sure this isn’t what Posnanski imagined when he signed up to do this project.

GQ posted an excerpt of the excerpts it is running from Joe Posnanski’s Paterno book in its September issue.

The post contains a weird illustration of Paterno holding a cell phone while talking to someone with long hair. That couldn’t be Posnanski, who, like me, is hair challenged.

The short excerpts reveal that Scott Paterno was the first person in the inner circle to realize the magnitude of the Sandusky mess. He told his father that he may have coached his last game.

It also discloses that Paterno had no pull left on the Penn State board to bail him out in an effort to save his job.

Then there was this passage:

On Thursday, Paterno met with his coaches at his house. He sobbed  uncontrollably. This was his bad day. Later, one of his former captains, Brandon  Short, stopped by the house. When Brandon asked, “How are you doing, Coach?”  Paterno answered, “I’m okay,” but the last syllable was shaky, muffled by  crying, and then he broke down and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with  myself.” Nobody knew how to handle such emotion. Joe had always seemed  invulnerable. On Thursday, though, he cried continually.

“My name,” he told Jay, “I have spent my whole life trying to make that name  mean something. And now it’s gone.”

GQ said it will post the entire excerpt on Monday. Simon & Schuster will release the book on Tuesday.

Clearly, this short excerpt shows the access Posnanski had with the Paterno family. I’m all for access, and it will interesting to see what Posnanski writes about the inner circle’s reaction, leading up to Paterno’s death in January.

However, the book is 400-plus pages. Are you also going to be in the mood to read about Penn State’s great victory over Miami in the 1987 Fiesta Bowl? Probably not.

Again, can’t wait to see how Posnanski attempts to pull this off.

The U.S. women/kids gymnasts winning the gold medal Tuesday certainly was a great uplifting story.

However, Dominique Moceanu reveals in her new book that life as a top teenage gymnast isn’t all warm and fuzzy.

Given all that continues to unfurl in the Penn State case, it is unfathomable that a proper biography could come out now about Joe Paterno.

Yet Simon & Schuster is going ahead with Joe Posnanski’s book, Paterno, which is set to be released Aug. 21. However, don’t expect to see Posnanski do a full-blown book tour.

From a story in the New York Times:

Now Simon & Schuster is limiting interviews with Mr. Posnanski and scaling back a planned book tour. Anne Tate, a spokeswoman for the publisher, said in an e-mail, “We’re sensitive about putting our author in forums where he might be viewed as a stand-in for his subject.”

Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, said in an interview that the release of the Freeh report had complicated matters for the book.

“It’s made people angrier at Joe Paterno,” he said. “And that has made it a more difficult environment to publish a biography about Joe Paterno.”

Later:

Mr. Karp heatedly defended his author, pointing out that the book had been under a strict embargo and that review copies had not been distributed. Few people, he said, have read it.

“I will say this — I think there has been a lot online about this book,” Mr. Karp said. “And I’m amazed by some of the vitriol with regard to Joe Posnanski, who is a truly gifted writer. People can pass all the judgment they want about Joe Paterno, but Joe Posnanski deserves a chance to be read.”

But this doesn’t bode well for sales:

Michael Fox, the owner of Joseph Fox Bookshop in Philadelphia, has not read “Paterno,” but he knows he does not want to order a single copy.

“I just don’t want it on my shelf,” Mr. Fox said last week. “It’s distasteful and it’s not up to date. I’m sure there’s a lot of college football fans who want to read about the greatest coach of all time. But it’s not something I want to have in my store.”

According to the story, Posnanski was paid $750,000 to write the book. At this point, he has to wonder if it was worth it.

The book was published in 1974. Yet chances are if you go to a book store, you still will be able to find Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life.

Talk about setting the standard. Creamer’s biography was the Babe Ruth of sports books.

In tribute to Creamer, who died Thursday at the age of 90, I thought it would be fitting to recall his most famous work.

The book touched on all facets of Ruth’s incredible life, including his huge appetite for sex. It was well-known to most insiders, but Creamer brought it out in the open.

Creamer writes:

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about a time he and (Bob Meusel) were barnstorming together. They shared a hotel suite. Meusel was half asleep when Ruth came in with a girl, went into his room and made love to her in his usual noisy fashion. Afterwards, he came out to the living room of the suite, lit a cigar and sat in a chair by the window, smoking contemplatively…

In the morning, Meusel asked, “How many times did you lay that girl last night?” Ruth glanced at the ashtray and so did Meusel. There were seven butts in the tray.

“Count the cigars,” said Ruth.

Obviously, though, it was baseball that made Ruth a legend. Here’s Creamer on Ruth’s famous “Called Shot” homer at Wrigley Field:

Now. What about the legend ? What about the story, often affirmed, often denied, that Babe pointed to a spot in center field and then hit the ball precisely to that spot ? It is an argument over nothing, and the fact that Ruth did not point to center field before his home run does not diminish in the least what he did. He did challenge the Cubs before 50,000 people, did indicate he was going to hit a home run and did hit a home run. What more could you ask?

Later he writes:

Ford Frick, who was not at the game, tried to pin Ruth down on the subject when the two were talking about the Series some time later.

“Did you really point to the bleachers?” Frick asked.

Ruth, always honest, shrugged. “It’s in the papers, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yeah,” Frick said. “It’s in the papers. But did you really point to the stands ?”

“Why don’t you read the papers? It’s all right there in the papers.”

Which, Frick said, means he never said he did and he never said he didn’t.

I assume somebody at Simon & Schuster also decided the video Joe Posnanski did promoting Paterno was no longer appropriate.

As you can see when you hit play, it says: “This video has been removed by user.”

The video also can’t be found on Youtube (where it existed yesterday) and on the Amazon page for the book, which is where I saw it in the first place last week.

However, the video still can be seen on a Deadspin post that says Sports Illustrated decided to pass on running an excerpt on the book. Not sure why that’s the case. If I’m missing something here, please let me know.

Here’s the link of what I wrote earlier today about the video being off base in the wake of the Freeh Commission Report. Posnanski did the two-minute prior to last Thursday when Louis Freeh hammered Paterno and Penn State.

The video has a graphic with a header that reads: “Joe Paterno: Educator. Coach. Humanitarian.”

I’ve heard Paterno called many things in the last week, but “humanitarian” isn’t one of them.

Anyway, an interesting day for Posnanski and his book. Surely more to come in advance of the book being released Aug. 21.