Dancin' with Sonny Liston is a treasury of inside stories you have never heard before about athletes you thought you knew. Like the boxer Muhammad Ali (who, on the eve of the George Foreman fight in Zaire, whispered to Callahan by the Congo river, 'Black men scare white men more than black men scare black men'), the tennis player Boris Becker, who confided to Tom, 'The eyes of some of the fans at Davis Cup matches scare me. There's no light in them. Fixed emotions. Blind worship. Horror. It makes me think of what happened to us long ago') and the golfers Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer (whose bitter grudge the fans never saw, and whose ultimate reconciliation may be the sweetest untold story in sport). Also featured in this unique collection of sporting memories are the decathlete Daley Thompson, the pentathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and the basketball star Larry Bird, baseball brigand Pete Rose, yachtsman Dennis Conner, downhill skier Leonhard Stock, jockey Steve Cauthen and many more of the greatest players of the last 30 years.

Callahan covered Secretariat's Triple Crown. When the great chestnut ran, 'the trees swayed'. But Tom recalls the loser, Sham, just as vividly. 'My hope, ' says the author, 'is that, fully assembled, these bits and pieces of memories will come together to form a full-length portrait of the sporting world. My wish is that, along the way, you will be able to smell the cabbage'.