Olney, Buster

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Olney, Buster

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Office—ESPN Magazine, 19 E. 34th St., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER: Journalist. Entertainment & Sports Network (ESPN), senior writer, 2003–. Previously worked as a sports writer for New York Times.

WRITINGS:

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness, Ecco (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Buster Olney is a sports journalist who formerly worked at the New York Times, where one of his beats was the New York Yankees. In his book, The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness, Olney focuses on the 2001 Yankee team, which was in line that year to win back-to-back championships, only to lose in the seventh game of the World Series to the Arizona Diamondbacks. Olney takes that game as the focal point to explore the team, its players, its coaches, and management, including the team's vociferous and hands-on owner, George Steinbrenner. "I wanted to write it for the more general baseball audience, maybe in the same way that I wrote for the New York Times," Olney told Alex Belth in an online interview for the Bronx Banter Web site. "I always felt that I could slip in enough stuff that would appeal to baseball nerds like myself, but I wanted to write it for people who like characters. I wanted to write about the people."

Olney details each inning of the fateful seventh—and deciding—World Series game. However, in the process he takes time to digress and talk about how the team was put together and to explore the entire year and its successes and disappointments. He also profiles the team's players, revealing both their on-and-off-field personalities. In a review of The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty for Library Journal, Jim Burns called the book "an excellent work of sports writing." Burns also wrote that readers will "begin to care about them far beyond their performance in this one crucial game." Alan Moores declared in Booklist that Olney "delivers a winning valedictory to the five years he covered the team." A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt that "Olney provides crisp profiles of players" and called the effort "both subtle and opinionated, a densely layered portrait of the Yankees' late-20th-century dynasty." Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer felt that "both Yankees fans and Yankee haters will find this one interesting."