Roger Kahn is a man of highly varied passions. He loves to read Wallace Stevens and Thomas Hardy. He loves hearing Heifetz play Sibelius' D-minor Violin Concerto. He grew up listening to Sir John Gielgud recite Shakespeare on brittle 78-r.p.m. records and in the '40s saw Paul Robeson's towering Othello. He has a passion for all these pleasures--and sports as well.

"Othello is always going to strangle Desdemona," Kahn says "But sport is unpredictable and real. The pain is real, and the tears are real tears." Kahn, author of the bestselling The Boys of Summer, an affectionate look back to the glory days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn has been writing about sports for 26 years. This week he begins a new feature for TIME. His "Byplay" will appear 20 times a year, offering, in Kahn's words, "a dialogue with our readers on sports."

Kahn's debut piece deals with the greatest performing rhetorician in sports history, World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali. Kahn visited Ali at his training camp in the Catskills the week before the fight, and talked with him hours after he narrowly retained his title in a tenuous 15-round decision over Ken Norton. Says Kahn: The piece is a column on Ali, "the public image and the private man."

Kahn has written on murders and politics as well as athletic events in a career that includes reporting on the death of a Brooklyn bookie and a volume on student unrest at Columbia in 1968. "You're better able to write about sports when you've covered the rest of the world," he says. "But I prefer athletes to politicians. They're more direct and less devious." His next book, due in the spring, will chronicle America's love for baseball, from the semi-pro Berkshire (Mass.) Brewers to a Little League team in Puerto Rico.

Once a New York University "basketball major," as he claims Kahn still scuba-dives and plays softball occasionally in Manhattan's Central Park. Last summer he filled in at shortstop for TIME'S big game against a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED team. (TIME won, 15-4, and Kahn went one for two.)

Over the years, Kahn has discovered that several unlikely enthusiasts have shared his feeling for sports. "Keats was a great boxing fan," he says. "And once, during a late summer afternoon discussion, Robert Frost leaned toward me and confided, 'My family thought I would waste my life and be a pitcher. Then they said that I would waste my life and be a poet.' " Remembers Kahn: "Frost grinned as he added, They were right.' "

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