His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called southern.Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since the Troubles of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.

    On February 6, 1958, a plane carrying the so-called Busby Babes—named for manager Matt Busby—attempted to take off from a slush-covered runway in Munich following a European Cup match; the plane failed to lift off, careened off the runway, and crashed into a nearby house, killing 23 passengers. In this retelling of the harrowing experience, Frank Taylor recalls the events leading up to the disaster, the moment of the crash, and its appalling aftermath, as well as the flowering of this youthful, talented team and its rebuilding following the tragedy. Essential reading for all soccer fans, this compelling, eyewitness account features recollections from players who survived—including the revered Duncan Edwards who died 15 days after the crash—as well as exclusive photographs from the scene.

    It fills a long neglected gap in the football buff's library and was universally well received when it was published in hardback in 1983.

    

    Traces the early life of the Oklahoma Indian farm boy who achieved a unique sports career as winner of Olympic gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon and as a professional baseball and football player.