Your five favorite sports books

Many of my faves have been listed here - great calls on Ghosts Of Manila. Couple other boxing ones I'll throw out, The Devil And Sonny Liston and Rocky Marciano: Biography Of A First Son.

I'll throw out Dollar Sign On The Muscle, a fine book on baseball scouting.

 

In no particular order:

Heaven Is A Playground.
Home Game.
Namath.
Losing The Edge.
(Tie) When The Lights Went Out/Searching For Bobby Orr.

 

When I mentioned I surely would forget books that I should list...well, It Never Rains was one of them. Great read.

 

Someone mentioned a dearth of good basketball books. I'll throw out five of my favorites, in no order:

1. The Last Shot - Darcy Frey. Gorgeously-written tale of a young Marbury in Coney Island. Still love the way Frey describes a jumpshot as "unspooling" on the first page
2. The In-Your-Face Guide to Pick-Up Basketball - Wolff and Wielgus - hard to believe Alex wrote this when barely out of college. Funny, dead-on, a love letter to the game, if a bit dated now.
3. A Sense of Where You Are - McPhee. Perfect match of writer and subject.
4. Heaven is a Playground.
5. The City Game. Axthelm

There are plenty of other good ones too - McCallum's Suns book is excellent (the Alvin Gentry anecdotes alone are worth it) and Brook Larmer wrote a fascinating book from China called Operation Yao Ming.

And, to add a non-hoops book, I'll throw in Halberstam's The Amateurs, which made me care about something I thought I never could, rowing.

 

A couple of other books I really liked were: The Sweet Season by Austin Murphy and A Civil War, Army vs. Navy by John Feinstein.

 

1. Sunday Money, Jeff MacGregor -- Just a beautiful, hilarious, touching portrait of America.

2. How Soccer Explains The World, Franklin Foer -- Given to me a few years ago by my SportsJournalists.com secret santa. Wonderful idea and execution.

3. Road Swing, Steve Rushin -- Just cause.

4. FNL, Bissinger -- Other than Homicide, I think it's the best example, in the last 25 years, of a non-fiction writer capturing the complexities of an entire community, warts and all.

5. Far Afield, SL Price -- I think the best modern book written about what it's really like to write about sports for a living.

 

I second so many of those mentioned (Heaven is a playground, FNL, The Last Shot, Far Afield...) Some that i don't think have been mentioned yet:

"Bringing the Heat" by Mark Bowden. I just read it a couple years ago and it blew me away. His details are fantastic and he got a lot of people to talk very openly about life in the NFL, especially a few newly-divorced wives. That Eagles team was a goldmine of stories, and it really showed what the NFL was like before the big, big money came in.

Bill Bradley's "Life on the Run." A spare, eloquent journal of two weeks in the NBA. He even talks about bedding a sexy stew.

"When Nothing Else Matters," by Michael Leahy. An almost literary coda to the Jordan trilogy, following Smith's book and Halberstam's bio/last season recap. I know some people thought it was too negative at times, but I really thought it was a universal story about growing old and inevitable failure, almost like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom.

Norman Mailer's "The Fight." A very Mailer account of Ali-Foreman.

The Natural and Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams). The books are much better than the movies.

 

Didn't know this existed. Just reserved it in my library's system. Tks.

 

Seabiscuit was a great read. I learned all I know about horse racing from it.

 

Sunday Money was a disapointment. I had hoped for a more in depth version of Wolfes " Last American Hero " and ended up with what seemed like a Margaret Mead socialogical study on the habits of red necks. Mcgregor comes across as a typical effete eastern liberal looking to poke fun at the sport of the south.

 

1. Ball Four
2. Foul (the Connie Hawkins story)
3. Namath
4. When Pride Still Mattered
5. North Dallas 40