Very happy with my purchase. This book contains many great Los Angeles sports stories I didn't know about. It is funny and concise. I would recommend this book to any Los Angeles sports fan. My husband loved this book. He's a sports fan and an ex player.
Sports Fan Needs This Book!! I love this book!! Once you get through one list you'll want to go on to the next one. I especially enjoyed the guests they asked to submit their own list. I really enjoyed this book. It was a really fun read. I learned a lot of things and found a lot of fascinating facts from this book.
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Sports fan should read this book, you will not be dissapointed. This book is a great read and should be on the back of every guys toilet! Great facts about sports in Los Angeles. The book is funny and knowledgable. Gave me a sweatpants boner. I absolutely loved this book. If you grew up in Southern California and were a sports fan, you need this. Even if you didn't, you'll get great insight into the LA sports scene over the past sixty years.
The Great Book of Philadelphia Sports Lists by Glen MacNow
It brought back so many memories. A little heavy on the Lakers stuff, but this is a Lakers town so that has to be expected. My favorite lists were the top 10 Chickisms words or phrases that Chick Hearn came up with , the top 10 sports video games, and the list of current and former LA athletes they used to build the perfect or super athlete Michael Cage's shoulders are dead on. Explaining all of the Chickisms to my wife and son was a blast and it made me miss the man that called the first ever Laker game that I watched on tv even more.
Trying to figure out who put what list together or who wrote each blurb was also fun. If it was witty and humorous, I assumed that Money wrote it. This is maybe the best bathroom book of all time. Every time I hit the john at my house, I'll be picking this book up to look back into the Los Angeles sports scene that I remember growing up.
See all 8 reviews. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. Deford's biography Big Bill Tilden is also highly recommended. Weighing in at a trim pages, Gardner's tale meticulously depicts the seedy, second-rate boxing scene in Stockton, Calif.
The master prose stylist portrays parallel basketball worlds in New York City: Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks won the championship, and the playgrounds of Harlem, where stars such as Earl The Goat Manigault burned brightly but too briefly. The movie was a mawkish Rocky-in-flannels, but the novel is a darker, more subtle tale of phenom Roy Hobbs, who loses his prime years to a youthful indiscretion, then gets a second chance. TIME called the novel which ends differently from the film "preposterously readable.
Gent was a Cowboys receiver from to '68, so his darkly funny novel about a league rife with drugs and depravity left fans guessing. Pulitzer Prize winner Maraniss turns his attention to pro football's most acclaimed coach, Vince Lombardi, and skillfully reveals the complex man behind the legend. SI's review said it "may be the best sports biography ever published. This biography, which broke new ground with its voluminous research and unsentimental gaze at an american folk hero, is still considered the final word when it comes to separating Ruth fact from fiction, such as his alleged called shot in the World Series.
Wodehouse's status as golf's shakespeare, its master comedian and tragedian, is borne out by this collection of short stories in which golf and love are the two constants. Blount spent the '73 season following and drinking with the predynasty Steelers. As the subtitle says, they were "Super but Missed the Bowl. The protagonist of this sad but stirring fictional memoir finds refuge from his troubled life by focusing on his football hero, Frank Gifford. A Newsday reviewer called the tale of demons and Giants "the best novel written in the English language since The Great Gatsby.
Cramer takes DiMaggio from his boyhood in San Francisco to the hospital room in Florida where, as he lies dying, a trusted adviser slips the World Series ring from his finger. Brilliant, stylish and a riveting study in the degrading effects of adulation. An engrossing morality tale about the City College basketball team "five street kids from the city of New York--three Jews and two blacks" that won the NIT and NCAA titles, and the point-shaving scandal that doomed its players to infamy. Baseball is a lot less fun without promo-meister Veeck, who recounts the eureka moments behind the exploding scoreboard, the pinch-hitting midget and the contortionist first base coach.
He always gave fans what they wanted, even if that was, in one case, a fire-eating pelican. Originally serialized in SI in , Hogan's lessons proved to be an enduring hit.
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Tremendously detailed, down to how to waggle the club properly, this is the definitive primer on the sport from its hardest-working perfectionist. The Trinidadian Marxist's cricket-drenched memoir is equal parts sports, history and philosophy. American readers will need to bone up on the game the U. What's the big deal about three weeks in the life of the New York Knicks as chronicled by their star forward? Plenty, when the author is a Princeton grad, a Rhodes scholar and a future U.
Senator who writes with uncommon candor and intelligence. On the Shot Heard Round the World: The contemplative hunting essay "The Heart of the Game" is the highlight of this collection of off-center pieces so packed with vivid ironies as to choke you up when you're not laughing out loud. A shrewd, eccentric book about hunting and fishing and poaching golf balls from water hazards.
A literature professor recreates the scintillating Cubs-Giants-Pirates pennant race of Merkle's boner fame entirely through excerpts of the era's florid sportswriting--which means runners aren't merely thrown out at the plate, they're "massacred at the fourth bag. An oft-overlooked novel that blends fact and fiction to create a charming turn-of-the-century tale about the intertwined lives of New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson and the family of a young Jewish immigrant who makes his world series rings.
The breathtaking description of Secretariat's length Belmont victory is the highlight here, but Nack's book reissued as Secretariat: The Making Of A Champion is also memorable for the way it traces the great horse's bloodlines through racing history. James, recently hired by the Red Sox as a senior adviser, weaves together thoughtful essays and lists, often turning traditional wisdom on its ear with analysis that goes far beyond the numbers--and all without taking himself or the game too seriously.
This shrewd and funny novel, set against a cold war backdrop, explores the football-as-war metaphor through the life of a college running back.
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Wolf's understated prose is equal to his fascinating subject: The charges were disproved, but the great Hawk didn't reach the NBA until he was 27 and hobbled by bad knees. The same richness as Field Of Dreams, the movie it inspired, but on a wider canvas.
The novel has plot twists and fascinating characters not in the screenplay, most notably author J. Salinger and Eddie Kid Scissons, who claims to be the oldest living Cub.
List of films based on sports books
An accomplished climber, the author was sent to Mount Everest by Outside magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the world's most famous peak. What he came back with was a suspenseful account of a catastrophic season in which 12 climbers were killed. The final word on the controversial Black Sox scandal, a critical event in sports history. Former minor leaguer Asinof persuasively argues that the only participant worthy of exoneration is not Shoeless Joe Jackson but third baseman Buck Weaver.
In what The New York Times called a "rich, intelligent cultural history," Tygiel portrays not only Jackie Robinson's breakthrough season with the Dodgers but also the arduous year march toward integration by all teams in the major leagues. Nearing 40 and faced with the death of his mother and a failing marriage, Barich checks into a hotel near Golden Gate Fields racetrack and stays for the season. As he gambles alongside a flock of railbirds, he becomes, he says in this evocative memoir, "restored if not renewed.
The author spent a year with the Phillies' scouts when they were arguably the best judges of raw talent in the major leagues. The often hard lives of baseball's underpaid hunter-gatherers are rendered in lively detail. See the decoding of scout-speak in chapter 5. After this book Lyle was no longer known as just a Cy Young Award--winning reliever; he was the guy who liked to sit bare-assed on teammates' birthday cakes.
His hilarious as-told-to proves that a talented team can feud and ego-trip its way to the World Series. Hemingway called this dialogue-driven portrayal of the monthlong run-up to a championship middleweight bout "the only good novel I've ever read about a fighter. Sure, you can find stats galore on the internet. But for those who relish paging through career numbers and debating whether Smokey Burgess was better than Ed Bailey, this tome, which is revised every few years, is the final authority.
In what kind of world can Mike Tyson emerge from prison to discover that "raping a teenager had turned out to be a great career decision"? Only in the unseemly universe of heavyweight boxing. SI's Hoffer relentlessly peppers the sport with body blows. Ritter spent six years tracking down professional baseball players from the early s, then stepped aside to let them tell their remarkable stories in their own words. Virtually all of these men are gone now, but thanks to Ritter they'll never be forgotten. This one-volume reissue of an esteemed two-volume collection includes essays and fiction, profiles and columns by such first-rank writers as Roger Angell, Stephen Jay Gould and John Updike.
Abbott and Costello's Who's On First? While he was editing the literary magazine Granta in London, Buford, an American, spent his weekends with soccer hooligans, whose violence both repulsed and mesmerized him. Newsweek called this "one of the most unnerving books you will ever read. Helyar, A Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author of the best-selling Barbarians at the Gate, turns a critical eye to the businessmen who have run baseball for the past century. He delivers a withering analysis of the owners' inability to manage themselves or the game.
The protagonist in this mind-bending novel, J. Henry Waugh, invents a baseball board game, only to become so obsessed with the tabletop world he creates that he begins to lose his grip on reality--especially after one of his players dies from a beanball. This autobiography, completed shortly before Ashe died of AIDS, recounts the groundbreaking career of the Wimbledon champion turned social activist.
After reading Days in prison, Mike Tyson had Ashe's face tattooed on his left biceps. Readers were shocked by the brutality and rampant drug use in Meggyesy's memoir of his days as an NFL linebacker. This was one of the first books to focus on what the author calls the "dehumanizing" experience of the modern professional athlete. This collection of 30 fiction and nonfiction pieces, highlighted by the fantastical short story "Farrell's Caddie," elicits the same response in the reader.
Blais, a Pulitzer Prize winner, here follows the season of the Amherst Mass. High School girls hoops team from tryouts to the state championship. Her deftly drawn profiles provide insights into how important sports and winning can be for young women. Wooden's story is refreshingly free of the tedious "coach as CEO" lectures now so common in the genre. The book includes the Wooden Pyramid of Success, a guide for life and basketball that has been posted in many coaches' offices.
Updated and reissued in Of course, I am. Jones begins by apologizing for publishing an autobiography at age But his book, which discusses excellence in golf Jones had already won the U. Wolff embarks on a country journey--getting in a pickup game with two members of the royal family in Bhutan and visiting the masters of the crossover dribble in Peoria--to test his contention that basketball is an "intercultural epoxy.
Frey follows the fortunes of the teenage Stephon Marbury and others who try to play their way out of the "ghetto school for the projects" with varying success. The summer that Schwarzenegger turned 15 in Austria, he discovered bodybuilding and told his father, "I want to be the best-built man in the world. Then I want to go to America and be in movies. Ring's nephew Rex was an accomplished tennis player and a two-time Big Ten wrestling champ, but this hilarious send-up of golf culture might have been his greatest achievement.
It's a book that's hard to find but worth the effort. Mailer can come off as a self-important blowhard, but the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle provided such inherent drama that his heated prose--lionizing both combatants, but especially Ali--seems perfectly appropriate. The Negro Leagues, which had folded two decades earlier, were fading from memory when Peterson wrote this landmark history, sparking renewed interest in the leagues and restoring Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and other black stars to their rightful place in baseball's pantheon. Penick spent six decades jotting down his folksy wisdom in a red Scribbletex notebook, never intending to publish it.
Golfers everywhere should be thankful that, at 87, he decided to share his tips, garnered from teaching hackers and famous pros alike. An affectionate depiction of pro wrestling in the s, '50s and '60s, when the sport had a more benign, vaudevillian flavor. Jares does a terrific riff on the masked men, ersatz Indian chiefs, "leaping lords" and other baddies who routinely smuggled "foreign objects" in their trunks.
Before Everest, there was Annapurna.
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Frenchman Herzog led the first summitting of an 8,meter peak, dictating his story because he had lost all his fingers to frostbite. National Geographic Adventure called this "the most influential mountaineering book of all time. Considering their players-a one-legged catcher, a one-armed centerfielder, a year-old second baseman and a dwarf relief pitcher-perhaps it's not so surprising that the Patriot League team at the heart of this ribald satirical novel finishes The Uruguayan writer's meditation is part lyrical ode "I've finally learned to accept myself for who I am: The short chapters are so breezily written that even the Marxist medicine goes down smoothly.
The longtime New Yorker writer chronicles the game this "frappe of pleasure and pain" from its first appearance in the U. This insider's tour of Olympic-level figure skating serves up the intrigue behind the Lutzes and Salchows, the pushy parents and the skating officials who ham-handedly dealt with the effects of AIDS on the sport's athletes, coaches and choreographers. Gallico left the New York Daily News after 13 years spent covering a golden age of sports; this is his valedictory. His tales of Ruth and Dempsey ring with you-are-there immediacy, and his participatory journalism golf with Bobby Jones inspired George Plimpton.
The interviews with Ali's father and with Joe Martin, the cop who introduced Ali to boxing, are particularly illuminating. The hard-bitten newspaper man found himself charmed by the lovable bumblers known as the '62 Mets--"three game losers, an Opening Day outfield that held the all-time major league record for fathering children 19 , a defensive catcher who couldn't catch. When Fixx took up running, he weighed pounds and smoked two packs a day. When he wrote this cry to "change your life" which spent 11 weeks at No.
The splendid splinter may not extol batters "The ball isn't dead, the hitters are, from the neck up" or hurlers who "as a breed are dumb and hardheaded" , but no one has more eloquently explicated the act of squarely hitting a round ball with a round bat. Running back Duke Craig has turned 31, his body is aching, and his love life's a mess. This dark novel by the author of Prince of the City rings with authenticity, and no wonder: Daley spent six seasons as publicity director for the glory-days New York Giants. The Catholic Theologian, author of Belief and Unbelief and a Notre Dame football fan, muses on the religious underpinnings of sports, praising the "holy trinity" of baseball, football and basketball over "the illusory, misleading, false world" of work, politics and history.
An expose of rampant corruption in the Olympics that takes on former IOC chief Juan Antonio Samaranch's Fascist past, the temptations dangled by aspiring host cities, the extravagant demands for "perks" by IOC members and the widespread cover-up of athletes' drug use. SI's Rushin logged 23, miles in a rented Nissan Pathfinder for this hilarious travelogue of sports destinations high the Masters and low the Las Vegas restaurant that displays Andre Agassi's ponytail.
A ball-sy Kerouac-ian journey, minus the mind-altering drugs. The enchanting first half of the book recounts Murphy's golf- and life-altering round with Scottish "philosopher-poet" Shivas Irons. The second half, in which Murphy floats his loopy metaphysical insights, will have some readers begging for a mulligan. Dogged reporting by small-town sports editor Conway brought down Alan Eagleson, once hockey's most powerful man.
The author's legwork uncovered how Eagleson, working as both an agent and as head of the players' union, cheated players out of a small fortune. This oral history of 18 golden-age sportswriters shows that greats such as Cannon, Gallico and Smith could talk it as well as they wrote it.
Cannon sums up their philosophy: The author is the IU professor and Bobby Knight critic who took a leave due to threats from the General's loyalists, but this indictment of "Big-time U's" is Sperber's rightful legacy. He argues that large universities use sports to numb students to increasingly shoddy academics. This hard-boiled novel is loosely based on the gangster-driven rise and inevitable fall of the massive but glass-jawed heavyweight Primo Carnera, with Toro Molina Giant of the Andes in the title role. The shady promoter and press flack are the real stars.
The last of the estimated 67 million words written by Rice; he completed this autobiography three weeks before his death. The book is showing its age, but it also displays the poetry "Outlined against the blue-gray October sky" that made Rice king of his profession.
This angry screed is Lipsyte at his combative best as he rips the lazy sportswriters, establishment nabobs, team owners and TV executives who he says have hoodwinked the public into believing that big-time sports are a "positive force on our national psyche. Rather than accept a shoddy contract from the Louisville Ebony Aces, star catcher Bingo Long forms his own team and hits the barnstorming road.
Brashler befriended former Negro leagues stars while doing research, and he repays them with a warm portrayal of their humor and heartbreak. The author of Fatal Vision spent a year in a tiny mountain hamlet 85 miles east of Rome covering the local soccer team, which had, improbably, qualified for Italy's Serie B league. The season ends with a twist that will shock readers as much as it did McGinniss.
You'll never look at a pixie gymnast the same way again. This powerful book by a San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter reveals in excruciating detail the physical toll--including anorexia, osteoporosis and delayed menstruation--on competitors in figure skating and elite gymnastics. Olympia, by Leni Riefenstahl Granted exclusive access to the Olympics by Adolf Hitler himself, Riefenstahl produced a propaganda film and this collection of beautiful but chilling images. The Spectacle of Sport, by Sports Illustrated The best color photographs from the exciting first three years of the magazine as well as essays by such writers as William Faulkner, A.
Liebling and Herbert Warren Wind. Reading is so personal--much more so than movies or plays or even TV--that I'm always reluctant to name the "best" sports books. I only know what I like.