Top five sports books (non-fiction)

[kugelrund]

I thought I'd put it here because life on OTF Books moves slightly slower than Tom Huddlestone after a bottle of Benylin.

No football books. Otherwise this would be in football.

1. Levels of the Game - John McPhee
A brilliant description of the 1968 US Open semi-final at Forest Hills between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, intercut with a double biography that explains why they play(ed) the game the way they did.

2. Un Siècle de Cyclisme - Hervé Paturle/Guillaume Rebiere
Wonderful history of cycling. In a monstrous omission, it lacks an index.

3. Cult Baseball Players - edited by Danny Peary
Collection of why-I-loved-him pieces, including Elmore Leonard on George Kell; John Lithgow on Ted Kluszewski, and so on.

4. Beyond A Boundary - C.L.R. James

5. The Complete Who's Who of Test Cricketers - Christopher Martin-Jenkins

Ah. Honorable mention for The Summer Game - Roger Angell.

Oh, and You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting, about Americans plying their trade in Japanese baseball for one last payday, and the resulting culture clashes.

*Thinks about changing thread title*

[XXXXXX]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

1. Showered in Shale - Jeff Scott
2. Ball Four - Jim Bouton
3. Moneyball - Michael Lewis
4. The Long Ball: The Summer of '75 -- Spaceman, Catfish, Charlie Hustle, and the Greatest World Series Ever Played - Tom Adelman
5. Home Ice - Jack Falla (who died last Sunday -aged 64)

[Sundeporino]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

1/ Moneyball by Michael Lewis....I know nowt about baseball but found this book fascinating. Especially after finding out that Sam Allardyce and David Moyes were attempting toapply its way of thinking to football.

2/ Paper Lion by George Plimpton...Loved it.

3/ Night Train by Nick Tosches...A great read spoilt by Tosches inclination to lapse into flowery bullshit every now and then.

4/ Touching The Void by Joe Simpson....somehow makes clambering around on mountains interesting.

5/ ? by Thomas Hauser...the Ali biography...title????

Top 5 will probably be different tomorrow.

[Guest]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

1. Ball Four - Jim Bouton
2. A Season on the Brink - John Feinstein
3. The Life of Reilly - Rick Reilly
4. Let Me Tell You a Story - John Feinstein
5. Basebll is a Funny Game - Joe Garagiola

[Gambrinus]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

Wisden.

Is there anything worth getting on American Football?

[kugelrund]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

It's quite old now, but The New Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football, by Paul Zimmerman, is excellent as an analysis of the game and the strategies involved, and is an entertaining read with some good stories about various players. He played at college and semi-pro level, so knew what he was talking about.

Paper Lion, by George Plimpton, is a good read as well. He tries to make it onto the Detroit Lions roster as a 36-year-old quarterback - one of a series in which, as a reasonably gifted sportsman, he tried his hand at various professional sports to see how hard they really were.

(He also wrote a book on baseball - Out of My League - and golf - Bogey Man).)

He pioneered the participatory style of journalism, and they're still all good reads today.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

The Lure of Golf by Herbert Warren Wind is an essential anthology of contemporary accounts of some of the most famous American major championships of the 1940s to 1970s. While not as comprehensive as some more recent histories of the majors, this benefits from the fact that it was written by Wind, who was there at the time, and was one of the most respected figures in the game.

Similarly, The Open by Peter Alliss is a must-read for historians of the game - written in 1984, it gives Alliss' personal recollections of the main events and twists and turns of all the championships he spectated at, played in or commentated on from 1946 to 1983.

They're both long out of print, of course, but you might be lucky and find a copy occasionally on abebooks.com.

[ursus arctos]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

As I've mentioned before, the New Yorker was the closest thing we had to a sacred text when I was growing up, and two of the reasons for its exalted status were Roger Angell on baseball and Herbert Warren Wind on golf. Neither has ever been surpassed in my book (though I will keep an eye out for the Alliss book, which sounds intriguing).

The Zimmerman book that Bafflin cites remains the best "what's going on" gridiron book that I've ever read; it was almost good enough to get me seriously interested in gridiron.

This is an intrisically impossible task, but the list I would propose this morning is (in no particular order):

The Summer Game - Roger Angell (baseball)
Friday Night Lights - HG Bissinger (high school gridiron)
The Game - Ken Dryden (ice hockey)
Beyond a Boundary - CLR James (cricket)
Season on the Brink - John Feinstein (college basketball)

I've artificially limited myself to one nomination per sport and excluded reference works (in any list of those, Bafflin's Un Siecle de Cyclisme would be there, as would the original Baseball Encyclopedia and Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract).

But it's an impossible task.

[Cal Alamein]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

in no order

Ball Four - Bouton
Paper Lion - Plimpton
The Confessions of an American Soccer Player - Shep Messing
Three Bricks Shy of a Load - Roy Blount
Friday Night Lights

[Toby Gymshorts]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

I'll have to have a think about my top 5, however I really enjoyed "My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes" by Gary Imlach.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

Igniting my own interest if no-one else's, I've just done the abebooks.com search for Herbert Warren Wind's books, and they are available, albeit mostly from US booksellers. He appears to have written a similar anthology about tennis, as well, in the late 1970s, which I bet would be interesting. It's funny how many people of that era were involved in both golf and tennis - Mark McCormack, the inventor of both the world golf rankings and the modern concept of 4 professional "majors" (he wanted to create a "Grand Slam" his client Arnold Palmer could aim for, to emulate Booby Jones' achievement of 1930 and to give golf a structure to its season like tennis) was also (but less famously) a large figure behind the move to Open tennis in 1968, as McCormack represented many of the leading pro players and wanted them back at Wimbledon and Flushing Meadow.

I suppose this is because, back in the day in the States, there weren't "golf clubs" and "tennis clubs" as such but "country clubs", where both would be played by all?

[Guest]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

I'd agree with the Gary Imlach book and the Thomas Hauser book about Ali.
The Escape artist by Matt Seaton
French Revolutions by Tim Moore
Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson
by William Fotheringham
Tour de Force _ Daniel Coyle
The Armstrong autobiographies
I could go and on.
pm for you Bafflin

[The Purple Cow]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

Not particularly in order…

1. Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson
by William Fotheringham

2. A Lot of Hard Yakka: by Simon Hughes

3. The Escape Artist: by Matt Seaton

4. Touching the Void: by Joe Simpson

5. The Flying Scotsman: Graeme Obree

[Wyatt Earp]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

The Game by Ken Dryden is out in front for me; made me really have a go, unsuccessfully I must admit, at getting into ice hockey. Moneyball is a close second, and might win in another week.

Then from among: Friday Night Lights, My Father And Other Working-Class Football Heroes, The Willow Wand, Anyone But England, Beyond A Boundary, Fred (Arlott's biog of Trueman) and Unforgivable Blackness.

[Janik]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

I really enjoyed Le Tour by Geoffery Wheatcroft. In some senses a history of the tour de france, but with every third chapter being a repo which gives some cultural and historic background on a region of France. And hence by osmosis over the whole book, an overview of the entire country. Which, frankly, a general tour book should, as the Tour is more than just a bike race.
Well writen, and generally fascinating about more than just cycling. I liked it a lot. Despite some misgivings about the authors political views, drawn mostly from his biog and other add-ons, rather than the main text.

[kugelrund]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

French Revolutions by Tim Moore

Someone sent me that as a present a year or so ago, and I was quite enjoying it until I got to one joke that made me stop short.

Talking about the free-for-all whenever the Tour caravan passes, he says this:

A sockless loafer stomped proprietorially on a mini-frisbee; a woman with a face like a spat-out toffee held a small child up to the cheesemobile, screaming "Pour mes enfants!" in the manner of a Balkan beggar.

I read on, but a dozen or so pages later there was another that made me even more uncomfortable. He's talking about trying to warm up after a freezing descent in the Alps:

I hopped and stamped and slapped myself like a bereaved Iranian, but it didn't help.

Later, I had a bit of a rootle about online to see if it was par for the course with him, and read this in a review of one of this other books:

...unlike Bryson, Moore can make gaffes of taste, and some readers may find the gags about car crash victims and murdered Kosovan families beyond the pale...

He seems to stray unnecessarily into Bernard Manning territory. Given that he can obviously write amusing stuff without recourse to it, the cumulative effect of all this was to make me feel that he might... well, be a bit of a twat. To finish on an intellectual note.

[Third rate Leszno]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

As well as the cycling books, Touching the Void and Friday Night Lights (which blew me away, especially as I fucking hate American football), I would also recommend

The Lost Generation: The Tragically Short Lives of 1970s British F1 Drivers Roger Williamson, Tony Brise and Tom Pryce - by David Tremayne

Gilles Villeneuve: The Life of a Legend - by Gerald Donaldson.

Most of the motor racing books I buy are for the photography (which can be absolutely breathtaking, especially the 50s - 60s stuff with no armco and people standing on the edge of the track...) but these two are particularly well written. The three drivers covered in the first book were all as good as, if not better than James Hunt. Tom Pryce was the World Champion that Wales never had, yet few people outside the sport would have heard of them. It's a bit of a large format hardback though, which may put some people off.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a good writer. He did a very nice polemic against Blair. He's quite like Peter Oborne (who also wrote a very good sports book, on D'Oliveira).

Good call on The Willow Wand. There's a good chapter on CLR James in there, among other things.

I don't like Anyone But England that much. His starry eyed view of the Pakistan 1992 touring team is laughable. Did he not see Aqib Javed bowl a bouncer from about 20 yards? Was he at all familiar with Javed?

[ursus arctos]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

The Willow Wand is indeed very good, and Birley's perspective on James' ability to combine his Marxist and West Indian nationalist perspectives with a positively Edwardian view of the inherent nature of the game is extremely interesting.

Reading it (on Tubby's fairly recent recommendation) made me go back to Birley's Social History, which I had put down last winter, having found his recital of the intracies of Regency and later country house cricket and related nonsense to be too tiresome for words.

What I now realise is that that period is by far the weakest part of Birely's book, and that he really starts to pick up his game once WG appears on the scene. I'm currently through Packer and finally understand what Tubby was raving about the last time we discussed him.

[N est à?]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

Tubby, it sounds to me like Marqusee is having a go at you.

In-joking aside, Marqusee also examines at length the baiting and yobbish xenophobic chanting aimed at the Australian team during the Edgbaston Test in 1993... I'm sorry to say, I was a party to that goading.

[Wyatt Earp]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

Did it resemble "Women In Love", that marvellous scene by the fire?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Top five sports books (non-fiction)

ANM, this happens all to often. Authors on art books are having a pop at me all the time as well. John Berger and all them.

Ursus, the Simon Rae biography of WG is worth reading if you haven't done so already. I hadn't thought of the Birley as being weak pre-WG, but it makes sense on reflection, given what I reread of the book. Strangely, John Major is, according to Patrick Collins anyway, better on the pre-Grace period of Clarke's All England XI than anything else. Maybe we can put a cricket compilation together?

[imp]

Was looking to see if there was anything about George Plimpton or books about golf on 'Books', and came across this thread instead, scandalously mis-forumed.

Anyhow, I'm almost through reading Plimpton's Bogey Man (mentioned upthread), a tatty old copy I got for a buck 50 when I was in the US at Easter. I've never read a book about golf before because the game is a dead zone to me, but I have loved every page of this. It's got me googling Bob Bruno (Plimpton's pro partner at the author's first attempt to play in a tournament), who doesn't even have a wikipedia page as far as I can tell. I also have Out of My League on my shelf, which will be up next. Just very entertaining, anecdote-driven sports writing that's all the more enjoyable for its lack of any real coherent structure (it was originally three features for SI, so that might explain it).

15 years on, any new recommendations?

[ursus arctos]

I found all of Plimpton's books entertaining, though he definitely had a formula.

If you are looking for another golf book, I liked A Good Walk Spoiled by John Feinstein, though that may be too golfy for you.

[BallochSonsFan]

A few I've really enjoyed:

Playing With Fire by Theo Fleury and Kirstie McLellan.
- A brutally honest book about Fleury's life. He doesnt pull any punches when opening up about the abuse he suffered as a young player or try to sanitise his life. A hard read at times, but always compelling.

The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association by Ed Willes
- The World Hockey Association tried to shake hockey up and challenge the hockey establishment that was the NHL. It was only around for 7 season, but those 7 years were a rollercoaster ride.

Against All Odds: The Untold Story of Canada's Unlikely Hockey Heroes by P J Naworynski
- The story of Canada's 1948 winter olympic ice hockey team, consisting of players who had previously served with the Canadian air force during WW2.

Morbo by Phil Ball
- Still one of my favourite football books ever written. A really interesting look at various aspects of Spanish club football.

Herb Brooks: The Inside Story of a Hockey Mastermind by John Gilbert
- Brooks' US olympic team pulled off the miracle on ice at Lake Placid. He was a hugely interesting, and often very difficult, character and this book is a very good insight into a legendary sports coach.

The Russian Five: A Story of Espionage, Defection, Bribery and Courage by Keith Gave.
- There's a documentary of the same name. I really enjoyed reading the book. The lengths that some of those players went to in order to escape 80s communist Russia and defect to the NHL are incredible.