..I run the risk of seeming immodest, but it looks like the book you just opened is the first of its kind on our one-sixth of the land. Sports journalism is not very sensitive to the changes taking place around it. While we talk quite a lot about the economic problems of football, we try to stay as far away from politics as possible. We only get off with articles that seem to be mostly “custom” ones, advocating either for holding independent championships of this or that republic, or for maintaining the previous foundations. Moreover, we throw in something about the outrages during matches - as a rule, held in southern cities, and the narrator most often is one of the countrymen who lost there. And so I, a sports columnist for a Samara youth newspaper, took up the book. I've been to a lot of so-called "hot spots" lately. The frontline region of Azerbaijan, the agitated capital of Checheno-Ingushetia, Riga cluttered with barricades... The motley panorama of the events taking place here will, of course, become the property of historians. But I had sports trips. And on these pages we will talk about just one facet of our life.