Books: Aficionado of Failure

CHASE THE GAME

by Pat Jordan

Dodd, Mead; 216 pages; $8.95

To consider sport a metaphor for life is sad. To think of sport as life itself is tragic. None succumb to this delusion more readily than ghetto youth, for whom athletics is both a means of escape and an opportunity for approval. And none have described the process better than Pat Jordan. His own decline as a professional pitcher was recollected in the poignant autobiography A False Spring. Four years ater, he turns from the diamond to the court to watch basketball players...