As any true sports fan knows, discussing and dissecting great teams and stellar seasons can be almost as exciting as watching the event in the first place (who isn't addicted to NFL Films and ESPN Classic?). So if season tickets aren't an option, try one of the following sports-themed books for the fanatic on your list.
Baseball
REVIEWS BY JAMES NEAL WEBB
It's an annoying fact, at least to aficionados of other sports, that baseball fans are as enamored of its history as they are of the game itself. They seem to delight in telling one and all of the exploits of various greats "back in the day." Of course, this love of the past can be a two-edged sword—ask any Cubs fan about the last time they won a World Series. But more than the Cubs, more than the Red Sox or the Yankees, there is the team known as the Dodgers whose story goes back to the very beginning of the game.
Glenn Stout has written a definitive history of the team in The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball. In many ways the Dodgers embody America, what with their pastoral roots, coping with a gradual change to big-city life, being the first to embark on racial equality, then pursing the wide-open lifestyle of the West Coast. Stout takes us through each step of the team's storied history, pulling no punches. He sheds new light on Jackie Robinson's breaking the color barrier, the sad story of the end of Sandy Kofax's career, the many motivations for the move to Los Angeles, and the eclipse and subsequent resurgence of the franchise in recent times. Filled to bursting with an amazing array of photographs selected by Richard A. Johnson, The Dodgers is a rarity: a great coffee-table book as well as a well-written, thoughtful history.
While baseball has been criticized for its measured pace, it is precisely this that makes it such a wonderful subject for analysis. As a
writer for the New York Times and ESPN, Buster Olney has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game as well as a deft touch with words, and he uses both to great effect
in The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty. The night in question is Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks, and in telling the story of that game, Olney also manages to tell us how a team can be both dominant and in trouble at the same time.
Baseball teams are always reflections of their owners, and none more so than the Yankees. George Steinbrenner is the New York Yankees, and his machinations over the 30-plus years he's owned the team are legion—and legend. In this game-paced book, Olney examines the careers of the players as they come to bat, their managers, coaches, friends and futures. Olney doesn't have to work very hard to show that many of the Yankees' failures—and successes—are due to Steinbrenner's fanatical drive to win.
The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty is one of the most readable accounts of the inner workings of the game I've read in a while. If you're a baseball fan, pick this one up—it'll help you through the off-season.
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Basketball
REVIEWS BY BUDD BAILEY
How would you like to have lunch with Red Auerbach, one of legendary figures in basketball history, once a week, week after week? About a dozen people—most, but not all, with a basketball connection—do exactly that in Washington, D.C. Every Tuesday morning at 11, the group gathers at a Chinese restaurant for good food and better conversation. The 87-year-old Auerbach, the storied Boston Celtic coach, serves as the conversational fulcrum.
John Feinstein is one of those lucky dozen. After sitting and listening for a few years, he decided to get some of the dialogue down on paper. The result is Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game, a book that ought to delight any student of basketball. While Auerbach gets top billing as author, this is written from Feinstein's viewpoint. He skillfully goes through Auerbach's life in chronological order. The Celtics won nine championships with Auerbach as coach in the 1950s and '60s, and took seven more with him as general manager/president. As you'd expect, there are plenty of stories about such players as Bill Russell, John Havlicek and Larry Bird, plus comments on today's players and coaches.
Feinstein weaves the stories of the luncheon guests, as well as Auerbach's influence on their lives, throughout the text. Other books have been written by and about Auerbach, but this one certainly is the most fun.
It's easy to argue that the rise of the NCAA basketball tournament, the Final Four in particular, is one of the great sports stories of the past 65 years. It has grown from an almost second-rate affair in 1939 to one of the biggest events of the sports
calendar. NCAA March Madness: Cinderellas, Superstars, and Champions from the NCAA Men's Final Four is an excellent way to review how far the tournament has come, and to relive its great moments.
The editors have collected some of the best basketball writers in the country—Billy Reed, Frank Deford, Dick Weiss, Dave Kindred and Art Spander among them—to review the Final Four, year by year. They get some help from John Wooden, winner of 10 championships as coach at UCLA, who contributes the book's introduction. Just about anything Wooden says and does is worthwhile, so it's wonderful to hear from this wise man here. The accompanying DVD of the highlights of the 1979, 1983 and 1987 Final Fours is a nice touch. Between the book and the DVD, March Madness is a great package.
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Golf
REVIEWS BY MARTIN BRADY
Mark Frost's The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America and the Story of Golf is definitely for the thinking golf fan. This lengthy history charts the first major American growth of the game, essentially the first half of the 20th century. The inspirational touchstone for Frost's work is the astounding rise of Bobby Jones (1902-1971), who became the first tee-to-green matinee-idol in the U.S. Jones burst on the scene as a precocious teen during World War I, enjoyed a decade of unparalleled success, then abruptly retired from the game at age 28, his mythic legacy secured. Frost's text mostly blends Jones' biography with match accounts and tons of anecdotes involving his challengers, such as Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Francis Ouimet. To place golf events in their larger historical context, the author periodically pauses to focus on world events and cultural movements, often in engrossing detail. Strangely enough, Frost's descriptions—of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, for example—are sometimes a lot more riveting than the somewhat exhaustive tournament rundowns. Coverage of Jones and his times—including his role in the founding of Augusta National, site of the Masters—is packed solidly up till about 1950, at which time Jones began to suffer the ravages of the paralyzing spinal-cord disorder syringomyelia. The disease would torture him the final 20 years of his life. Even to the end, Jones was an upbeat figure beloved by all: a man whose purist, high-achieving approach to the game established him with Dempsey and Ruth as a seminal giant of American sport.
Matthew Rudy's
Golf Digest Perfect Your Swing: Learn How to Hit the Ball Like the Game's Greats is for serious players searching for the stylistic tools to optimize tee-shot power and efficiency. Veteran sportswriter Rudy gathers descriptions and analyses of the careers and swing secrets of more than 40 pros, past and present, ranging from Jones, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead to Mickelson, Singh, Els and Woods. For each golfer, there are sequential (mostly color) photo sets, taken from various angles, which provide ideas for personal experimentation, at the same time fueling that obsessive search for maximized driving skills. This is a practical instructional guide for golfers looking for first-shot distance with a driver.
Technique is overrated, according to some golf observers.
Cal Brown's The Sweetest Game: Play Golf by Your Better Instincts more or less supports that notion, with its Zen-like collection of anecdotes and advisories both about and from the greats of the game. The text includes plenty of personal testimony on how golfers deal with shot-making challenges, technique afflictions (shanks, the Yips), other players' idiosyncrasies, and the supremely mental nature of the game. Acclaimed instructors like Bob Toski and Harvey Penick are represented as readily as tournament icons such as Arnold Palmer and Gene Sarazen. The book is filled with interesting black-and-white photos of name players from the last century.
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Sports Media
REVIEW BY BUDD BAILEY
Sports fans couldn't help but notice ESPN's 25th anniversary this year; there was enough programming about it on the network's various
television outlets (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, etc.) to start a new channel. The multimedia party also reached bookstores with
Charles Hirschberg's entertaining and
thoughtful ESPN25—25 Mind-Bending, Eye-Popping, Culture-Morphing Years of Highlights.
Hirschberg argues that the first sports highlight was a drawing of a hunt on a wall of a cave in France that dates back 16,000 years. He takes us through statues and paintings from Greece and Rome, movies of boxing matches from 1900 or so, newspaper accounts and pictures, radio broadcasts and, finally, television programs. ESPN's news show, "SportsCenter," has become famous for its highlights over the years. Hirschberg examines the effects of today's video clips—good and bad—on the sports culture. It's all done with a tone that mixes a sense of respect with fun.
The package has some bonus material as well. It contains a variety of lists, from best draft picks to worst uniforms, from best sports books to most lopsided trades. ESPN 25 also includes a DVD containing several commercials of the popular "This is SportsCenter" ad campaign. ESPN has changed the way we look at sports during its quarter-century run. This book is an entertaining way of marking those 25 years on the air.
REVIEW BY MICHELLE JONES
Given the growing popularity of television in the mid-1950s, it may have seemed an inauspicious time to launch a weekly sports magazine.
Media mogul Henry Luce didn't subscribe to that kind of logic, however. After all, he had launched Fortune magazine during the
Great Depression and redefined business journalism in the process. Sports Illustrated ended up doing the same for sports
coverage and is celebrated in Sports Illustrated: 50 Years, The Anniversary Book. Don't skip "1954," the chapter that describes the state of various sports and the country at the time of the magazine's August 16, 1954, debut.
SI's winning game plan includes imaginative photography (and often clever paintings) and the magazine's signature writing style. Several of the articles can be found in the book, but in a condensed form: only the opening spreads are included. SI is also known for its covers. All are presented here in chronological order as well as in a few thematic groupings. Yes, the swimsuit covers are included and discussed; curiously there is not one mention of the infamous "cover jinx."
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