This first book to examine the two popular realms of sports and autobiography looks at recurring patterns found in athletes" accounts of their lives and sporting experiences, examining language, metaphor, and other rhetorical strategies to analyze sports from the inside out. Drawing on the life stories of well-known athletes, Pipkin follows players from the echoing green of eternal youth to the sometimes cultlike and isolated status of fame, interpreting recurring patterns both in the living of their lives and in the telling of them. He sheds light on athletes" common obsession with youth and body image; explores their descriptions of being in a zone; and considers the time that all athletes dread, when their bodies begin to betray them . . . and the cheering stops.