Your five favorite sports books

Cobb, by Al Stump

Big Bill Tilden, by Frank Deford

The Amateurs, by David Halberstam

DiMaggio, by Richard Ben Cramer

Harold Gimblett, Tormented Genius of Cricket, by David Foot

 

Clemente - David Maraniss
Friday Night Lights - Buzz Bissinger
Caddy For Life - John Feinstein
Moneyball - Michael Lewis
Lance Armstrong's War - Daniel Coyle

If you want to count it, Have A Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks by Mick Foley is pretty damn interesting considering the entire thing was written by a guy who gets hit in the head with stuff for a living.

 

I'm gonna second Rosenburg's War As They Knew It--brilliant stuff and really well-written. The passages when he ties in Emerson were my favorites.

Season on the Brink is also on my list, along with Eight Men Out and two I haven't seen on here yet: Feinstein's A Good Walk Spoiled and The Summer Game (or any collection of Roger Angell's work that includes "Three for the Tigers"--don't know if that counts). Callahan's Ernie Accorsi book gets an honorary mention. And I know this isn't non-fiction, but Deford's The Entitled read like it was--I finished that in about three hours the day I bought it.

I'll preemptively add Posnanski's book about the Big Red Machine, too. I'm sure that'll be awesome.

 

Agreed. Can't wait for that. His book on Buck O'Neil was incredible.

 

No Skip Bayless?

I'm probably forgetting some, but these are ones I've read multiple times, so they must be close to my top 5.

-Season on the Brink
-Friday Night Lights
-The Franchise (the Maccambridge book about SI; I think this is also the title for books about the pistons and LeBron's Cavs).
-Sunday Money
-Ghosts of Manila-Mark Kram
-The Sweet Season-Austin Murphy. Great writing, and is also about my alma mater, St. John's.

Someone mentioned the Leahy book about Jordan, which I strongly agree with and I think it was sort of ignored when it came out, unfortunately.

I'm sure there have been essays written about it before, but why does baseball lend itself to more great writing than, say, basketball? I'm a much bigger hoops fan than baseball, but have read countless more baseball books. Halberstam's are all outstanding, Jack McCallum has a couple of good ones, Feinstein, but there's a particular lack of great NBA ones. I have fairly high expecations for Simmons' upcoming NBA one, as long as it's not a "BIRD WAS BETTER THAN MAGIC" diatribe.

 

Can't play, as it would be Outing City.

But among the non-obvious mentions, emphatic kudos to:

The League, Koufax, When Pride Still Mattered, and Namath (especially the portion reflecting the period AFTER Joe Willie left Alabama . . . ).

 

Sirs, Madames,

Secretariat, Nack
Laughing in the Hills, Barich
Marcus Dupree, Morris
Sweet Science, Liebling (A Neutral Corner covering some of the same ground)

Those are my first tier. Nack's is pulling away but Barich's is sort of a noble Sham. I don't really have a fifth that's up there with those four although previously mentioned Kram's Manila, Instant Replay (my grade 9 book report), Bradley's It Never Rains, Paul Hemphill's The Heart of the Game, and Ball Four among others would be knocking. Two horse books in the top 4, odd because I'm not much of a horse-racing fan either. Not a hockey book even close, sadly. Not a golf book. The City Game was big for me in university but I don't think it has aged that well--I'll have to have another look at it. Stuff under the radar that would be near the top ten: Telander's Heaven Is a Playground, Art Hill's I Don't Care if I Never Come Back (I have an autographed copy of his Don't Let Baseball Die, personalized to Canadian radio personality Peter Gzowski), This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own, W.R. Burnett's The Roar of the Game, Running the Table ... funniest of all is Minnesota Fats's The Bank Shot.

o-<

 

Lots of great ones here, including a couple mentions of "A Few Bricks Shy of A Load" by Roy Blount.

I'll throw out a great book which, to me, is a sports book as well as a lot more -- "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley.

 

Oops, forgot:

Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball, Helyar

DeBusschere's The Open Man and Kramer's Instant Replay are also sentimental favorites in the diary type books.

 

Since someone brought up "Lords of the Realm," I have to chip in with Brad Snyder's "A Well-Paid Slave" about Curt Flood. Came out just a couple of years ago, and really compelling reading. Snyder's an interesting guy - former Baltimore Sun baseball guy (believe he walked right off the campus of Duke University into the Orioles beat), then onto Yale (!) Law School, then into law firm life, then out of that and into authorship. All by like age 30 or so.

 

Clemente, Koufax, Unitas and Namath are four books that I could read again this weekend. The one on Roberto is as good a book on an individual athlete as any in the past decade or so. Really, really interesting.
I came away from that book so upset as to how that tragedy happened and could have been avoided. Extremely revealing.


A book that has come out in our region and I don't believe has made the national scene is "Slam Dunked," about the infamous integration of men's basketball at then named Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana-Lafayette) by former coach Beryl Shipley. it's about the mid-1970s when he brought in the likes of Dwight "Bo" Lamar, Garland Williams, Roy Ebron and other stud players and was whipping up on teams who hadn't integrated yet. fascinating and particularly so because i was fortunate to have covered much of that era.
The school was given the death penalty by the NCAA and had a list of, oh, 125 violations.
Shipley, ever the amusing one and who didn't take crap from anyone, said that "only" 50 or so of those violations were true and he called the NCAA a "Mickey Mouse" operation.
When told about his comments, the NCAA brass asked him to apologize.
Never one to miss a Kodak moment, Shipley replied: "I will. To Mickey Mouse."
But this book goes into all of the details of this crazy era, one somewhat similar to Don Haskins when he won the NCAA title with a lineup comprised of African-Americans.
And to this day, Shipley remains pissed at the NCAA and vents much of his frustration with that whole scenario in the book.
Pardon the lengthy spiel on this book, but it's must reading for anyone on SportsJournalists.com who might be aware of that time in Deep South/Louisiana collegiate hoops.