14 Sports Books
by DICK FRIEDMAN Although sports deals with fun and games, what distinguishes these books is their close, painful, and evocative examinations of defeat and despair. The very best, in presenting fully rounded portraits of our icons, often leave the reader with a lingering sadness, along with an enhanced awareness of our inevitable decline.There is so much depth in this field that there are many reserves who missed the cut. Where have you gone, Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio:The Hero’s Life? Or The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract? Or Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, or even the Chip Hilton series? And the peerless David Halberstam can’t make it out of round 1?
The Sweet Science, by A.J. Liebling Sunday Money, by Jeff MacGregor Instant Replay, by Jerry Kramer Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof A Season on the Brink, by John Feinstein The Natural, by Bernard Malamud Paper Lion, by George Plimpton The Gilded Age of Sport, by Herbert Warren Wind The Game, by Ken Dryden North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent Ball Four, by Jim Bouton The Junction Boys, by Jim Dent The Summer Game, by Roger Angell The Long Season, by Jim Brosnan When Pride Still Mattered, by David Maraniss Loose Balls, by Terry Pluto Moneyball, by Michael Lewis Babe, by Robert Creamer Fever Pitch, by Nick Hornby Levels of the Game, by John McPhee
Science Science Replay Science Brink Lion Lion Pride Game Ball Four Ball Four Pride Summer Game Pride Pride Moneyball Moneyball Pitch Moneyball Seabiscuit Seabiscuit Semi-Tough Boys Lights Lights Golf Omnibus Boys River Boys Boys of Summer
Even given his legendary girth, master of boxiana Liebling still may be, pound for pound, the most felicitous stylist in sportswriting history. But he runs up against a true heavyweight in Maraniss. Doggedly and perceptively tackling pro football’s most iconic figure,Vince Lombardi, he has written the richest sports biography ever, one laced with reminiscence, regret, and revelation—reading it is compulsive and compulsory.
Hillenbrand’s captivating, out-of-nowhere saga of the Depressionera wonder horse can’t unseat Lewis’s lucid portrait of numbercrunching Oakland general manager Billy Beane and his theories about unearthing bargain talent—a work that inspired a gamechanging debate whose aftershocks reverberate in the biz of baseball.
The Boys of Summer
Ironically, Wisconsin product Maraniss is nipped by another hometown hero. Brooklynite Kahn crafted an elegy to his ’50s Dodgers, arguably the most beloved team in sports history. Lyrically wrought, it’s at once heartbreaking and loving. Most indelible are Kahn’s tenderly etched portraits of his Boys in midlife—faded, bruised by their existence after baseball, clinging to their memories, and achingly aware of their mortality. This is sportswriting’s most shining moment.
DICK FRIEDMAN is a senior editor at Sports Illustrated who has reviewed books for si.com. At the magazine, he has supervised coverage of pro and college basketball, baseball, golf, sports media, and fantasy football. He grew up in the Boston area, where he spent his weekends, depending on the season, watching such heroes as Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, Bobby Orr, and Carl Yastrzemski. The Red Sox’ win in the 2004 World Series relegated his daughter’s birth to the second-greatest event in his life. His daughter understood.
Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand You Know Me Al, by Ring Lardner Semi-Tough, by Dan Jenkins Heaven Is a Playground, by Rick Telander Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissinger Summer of ’49, by David Halberstam The Golf Omnibus, by P. G. Wodehouse Everybody’s All-American, by Frank Deford A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn My Losing Season, by Pat Conroy
Golfers give thanks (and shanks) for Wodehouse’s matchlessly choreographed, laugh-out-loud links stories, which remain as shrewdly fresh as the days they were written (some as far back as early last century). But Bissinger’s brilliantly detailed opus survives and advances, having generated a buzz by literally illuminating a heretofore undercovered slice of Americana.
In a minor upset, Harris’s sweetly sad baseball novel succumbs to Maclean’s alluring and shimmering fly-fishing primer–cum–memoir. The prose, as limpid and bracing as the Montana streams in which the story takes place, stirs readers who never baited a hook to head for the nearest Orvis outlet.