If you’ve ever happened upon an old scrapbook, or had occasion to thumb through an old yearbook, well, that’s the sensation I had reading Kerry Eggers’ anthology, “Scrolls of a Sports Scribe,” published late in 2025.

It’s a two-volume set, and that’s fitting, because Eggers was a prolific writer for three Portland newspapers, the Oregon Journal, the Oregonian and the Portland Tribune. That began in 1975 and spanned 45 years, the same amount of time I spent at three Northwest papers, one in Eugene and two in Seattle.

I wouldn’t say he and I competed against each other, but we certainly came across each other a bunch. Much of his work was either specifically related to the Trail Blazers or NBA figures that came into the Portland orbit, and the net we cast in Eugene didn’t regularly extend to the Blazers.

But Eggers’ work went far beyond Portland’s only major pro-sports franchise, and in “Scrolls,” he unearths those pieces, adding as a nice touch prefaces and postscripts that serve to provide context and perspective.

It’s an eclectic list – Tonya Harding and Dick Fosbury. LeBron James and Carl Lewis. Wilt Chamberlain and Muhammad Ali. Tiger Woods and Lloyd Daniels. John McEnroe and Paul Allen.

Surely, interest will be greater among readers with Oregon ties. But there’s enough national reach, both among those athletes and those from elsewhere, to carry the campaign.

I was fascinated by Eggers’ 1987 story on Terry Baker, the only athlete to win a Heisman Trophy and play in a Final Four. (In fact, it was Eggers’ father John, longtime sports-information director at Oregon State, who brainstormed a modest campaign -- still unheard-of in 1962 – that tilted the Heisman to Baker.)

One might have assumed that Baker led an idyllic life, just as he prevailed athletically. Turns out his father Max left the family when Terry was five and played no part in his upbringing.

Baker met his first wife at Oregon State, and they were married 18 years. Eggers quoted the former Marilyn Davis as saying of her ex-husband, “When it comes to others, I don’t think Terry is a very sensitive person. I never had the feeling he felt very strongly about the family or myself.” The marriage left her, she was quoted, needing “to feel loved.”

Turns out those sporting heroes, like the rest of us, aren’t bullet-proof. Among a series of stories on Danny Ainge – whom some consider the best athlete ever produced in the state of Oregon – Eggers examined Ainge’s decision to quit his job coaching the Phoenix Suns 20 games into the 1999-2000 season to spend more time with his wife and six kids.

“I would read something that was applicable to my team,” Ainge told Eggers, who visited his Phoenix-area home. “And I found myself thinking: ‘I should be applying those principles to my children and not the 12 players on my team.” . . . Through life, there aren’t many worse regrets than, ‘I could have spent more time with my family.’ ’’

Eggers’ efforts put him on a course to examine two of the Portland area’s all-time characters – Tonya Harding and Frank Peters.

He retraced Harding’s efforts – as a pro wrestler, as a boxer, as a participant in “Dancing With the Stars” -- to rehabilitate an image crafted as a two-time Olympic figure skater to the depths after her guilty plea for hindering prosecution in a comically botched attack on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994. For that, she was banned for life by the U.S. Figure Skating Association.

Then there was Frank “The Flake” Peters, whom Eggers interviewed in 2022. Peters played on that 1963 Oregon State Final Four team with Terry Baker, but he became renowned far more for a zany persona, owning bars and restaurants in Portland and Seattle, and darkly, for spending 2 ½ years in Oregon State prison for drug and sex offenses.

“I was probably the beginning of keeping Portland weird,” Peters said, referencing the Rose City’s popular slogan.

“If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself,” Peters, then 78, told Eggers. “I’ve had a bypass and two hip replacements. Everything has been replaced except my balls and my brain, and they’re both still working.”

It was thoroughly fitting that Peters managed the mid-1970s Northwest League Portland Mavericks, the independent rag-tag team celebrated in the documentary, “The Battered Bastards of Baseball.”

(I can attest to Peters’ wackiness. Covering a game one night at Civic Stadium in Eugene, I saw Peters protest an umpire’s decision, and his ouster from the game, by stripping off his uniform down to his skivvies. The Mavericks had left the stadium by the time I finished interviewing the Eugene side, so I chased them down at the old Eugene Hotel. Peters, predictably, was in the bar.)

Think of the collection as period pieces, artifacts that for a time, ducked in and out of our lives. It’s worth checking out, at kerryeggers.com.