The View from Pluto: Collected Sportswriting About Northeast Ohio

by Terry Pluto

Sports fans in Northeast Ohio have seen a lot in recent years. The Indians' exciting rise to dominance in the American League . . . and their heartbreaking loss in Game Seven. The traitorous Browns move . . . and the team's hope-filled return. The blossoming of stars like Jim Thome and Omar Vizquel, the departure of fan favorites like Mark Price and Manny Ramirez, and the floundering of various overpaid disappointments.

And through it all there has been one constant: if something remarkable happens in local sports, Terry Pluto writes about it—well.

No sportswriter in Ohio has won more praise in the past decade.

For good reasons.

Pluto writes about sports as if they truly matter—because they do to the many thousands of us who start our day with the sports pages.

And he finds the stories with meaning beyond the box scores. Whether it's the honorable frustration of coaching a losing high school team, the sad truth of a promising career wasted, the exhilaration of youthful talent, or the satisfaction of hard-earned success.

This is the first book to collect the finest of Terry Pluto's sportswriting from the Akron Beacon Journal. For his legion of regular readers, it offers a chance to relive a decade's worth of highlights. For newcomers to Pluto, it is a wonderful introduction to one of the best writers in the world of sports.

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Terry Pluto is a sports columnist for the Plain Dealer. He has twice been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors as the nations top sports columnist for medium-sized newspapers. He is a nine-time winner of the Ohio Sports Writer of the Year award and has received more than 50 state and local writing awards. In 2005 he was inducted into the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame. He is the author of 23 books, including The Curse of Rocky Colavito (selected by the New York Times as one of the five notable sports books of 1989), and Loose Balls, which was ranked number 13 on Sports Illustrateds list of the top 100 sports books of all time. He was called Perhaps the best American writer of sports books, by the Chicago Tribune in 1997. He lives with his wife, Roberta, in Akron, Ohio."

Reviews

[Ken Heard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Terry Pluto would be a fun guy to hang around. He's got tons of sports stories in his career and he seems like a really nice, humble guy. He's not hung up on himself like some jocks would be and instead even writes about his ineptness in playing sports (He said he didn't "play" basketball but rather "sat" basketball, referring to the time he spent on the bench during games).

That said, my advice in reading this book is to take it slowly, almost as if reading his columns in the paper daily, one at a time, rather than trying to forge through several. There is repetition, but it's mainly because they are compiled over years. He writes of a radio friend often. It seems very repetitive, but remember, he actually wrote them over several years.

His columns about his father's stroke and subsequent passing are very heartfelt. Again, though, when read in in bundles, they lose some of the real impact.

Pluto captures a time of sports, the 1990s, when things were a bit.. different. There's the beginning of steroid use and the "big" salaries of, wait for it.. $1 million or more a season! He writes of the 1994 baseball strike and it offers a nice perspective of how we felt back then, reminding fans of the bitterness of not having baseball that summer.

He also has a column about a young high school basketball phenom ... LeBron James. He also writes of a lot of the Cleveland teams and, unless you're a real sports fan or from that area, some may not have the impact or feel to the reader.

This is a nice collection, but again, read it slowly and savor them. It's like eating a good meal. You don't scarf down the steak but instead enjoy it over time.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you were in Northeast Ohio and followed sporting events, Terry Pluto brings back many memories. Some good, some not. Excellent writer and recommend.

[Aaron Rund · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't start reading Pluto until he joined the Cleveland Plain Dealer in I believe 2009 or 2010, so I was interested in reading this book. While I liked a lot of the Browns coverage, I hated most of the Indians coverage. A lot of the Indians coverage regurgitated the same points, statistics, and facts over and over even though they were written months or years apart. I also enjoyed a lot of the high school columns in the book. Pluto is a man of faith, which is fine, but in some of his columns his faith comes on really strong. Not a bad thing for some, but for me at times, these columns got a little too preachy.