Holiday game plan

Indulge his love of sports this season

REVIEWS BY MARTIN BRADY

The 21st-century American male has had to make adjustments. His father more than likely was a typical denizen of 1950s or '60s culture, which meant he was the breadwinner, married a "dutiful" wife and lived in a home that was his castle. (At least, that's how all those TV sitcoms depicted it.) That's all changed, of course, but one thing that's never changed is men's relationship with sports. Which is why, when you're thinking about holiday gift-giving for a favorite guy, you can't go wrong with one of these recent books, each of which, in its own little way, is guaranteed to make a man feel like a man.

Team player

Only once in a long while does a sports book come along that captures the essence of the game with a combination of honesty, humanity and journalistic rigor. Tom Callahan's Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas is a stirring and lively portrait of Unitas the man and athlete, but Callahan also captures an era—the NFL of the late '50s and early '60s, when the game took off as an economic monolith, and a fan and media obsession. Callahan, a veteran writer who has worked for Time magazine and the Washington Post, spent a year interviewing all the key living persons affiliated with the late, great Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas. We learn about him primarily from his old teammates, a colorful group of rough-and-tumble ballplayers who were united by Unitas' no-nonsense leadership and amazingly unflappable on-the-field style in the course of winning consecutive league championships in 1958 and '59.

Besides gathering surprisingly moving quotes from the long-retired jocks, Callahan provides a play-by-play rundown of the famous 1958 overtime game in which the Colts defeated the New York Giants and essentially launched the modern era of big-money professional football. Unitas' humble origins are covered as well, including the now-famous story of how he was plucked from a sandlot football team and signed with the Colts in 1956 after his hometown Pittsburgh Steelers had cut him the previous year. This book is sure to take its place among those rare sports volumes in which we learn as much about people as we do the game itself.


Outta the ballpark

Last season's glorious The Football Book provides the template for this year's The Baseball Book, which, like its predecessor, brings to bear the fabulous photographic and journalistic style we've all come to recognize in Sports Illustrated magazine. Rob Fleder returns as supervising editor for this historical celebration of the summer game, which features stunning color photos of big players and big plays—even the equipment—sometimes from unusual and thrilling angles. There are plenty of stirring black-and-white shots as well, of revered old-timers and classic on-field moments from the past. Several dozen essays from the SI archives feature the all-star writing talents of guys like Frank Deford, Leigh Montville, Tom Verducci, Roger Kahn and Rick Reilly, and the text is interspersed with all-decade teams, descriptions of important yearly match-ups, lists of colorful nicknames, statistics on best and worst teams and more. Sidelights on pop culture and world affairs add generational context. It's simply a gorgeous effort, and, like its football counterpart, is agreeably priced.


Philip J. Lowry is an engineer and also a college professor who teaches Arabic language and Middle East politics. But Lowry's special passion is baseball—in particular, baseball stadiums. Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of Major League and Negro League Ballparks is an update of Lowry's incredibly useful reference on baseball stadiums throughout the U.S., specifically those used in the major leagues and pro-level Negro Leagues during the past 140 years. Coverage is from Akron to Zanesville, from the long-defunct or demolished to the newly constructed. For each of the 405 stadiums, Lowry provides specific location, playing-field dimensions, crowd capacity (even as it changed through the years) and all manner of trivia about the stadium's structural quirks and the teams that played there. Black-and-white archival photos of these venerable venues stud the text, and some of them are just good enough to evoke misty-eyed memories in the nostalgic baseball fan. An excellent index speeds access.


For the record

Allen St. John writes for the Wall Street Journal and also contributes to other big-name national publications. In Made to Be Broken: The 50 Greatest Records and Streaks in Sports, St. John describes, delineates and offers the historical background on sport's most hallowed records, from Hank Aaron's all-time home-run mark to "Pistol Pete" Maravich's college basketball scoring exploits, to Lance Armstrong's cycling feats. Football, tennis, NASCAR, the Olympics, hockey, golf, horse racing, track and field—the major endeavors are all represented, and St. John devotes several pages to each record, offering interesting speculation on how long, and if, it can be expected to withstand the onslaught of athletes yet to come. The photo coverage is excellent, much of it in color, and the book comes with a DVD.


Not-to-be-missed links

If a book's weightiness were measured strictly by the pound, then James W. Finegan's Where Golf Is Great: The Finest Courses of Scotland and Ireland would have to be the equal of Finnegan's Wake. Finegan, a veteran golf writer, brings the spirit of great travel writing to this massive tome, which includes 750 color photographs, most of them by Lawrence Lambrecht, documenting more than 150 time-honored courses. Finegan's descriptive prose is lavished with impressive detail, and his passionate explication on how to best navigate the courses' challenging fairways and greens will captivate golf-playing readers. Tim Thompson's ancillary photos provide a charming overview of the surrounding Scottish and Celtic villages and castles. This volume's a sure winner for that golf-nut guy, who just might be inspired to take the golf vacation of a lifetime.


A room of his own

The single man can just about keep his stuff anywhere he pleases, whether it's his collection of vintage beer cans, his motorcycles, his baseball memorabilia or his pinball machines. Austin-based writer Sam Martin approaches ManSpace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory with the point of view that, eventually—often after he gets married and has children—a guy's stuff has to vacate the living quarters and get farmed out to the garage, basement or attic, which tends to farm the guy himself out to the domestic outback. This entertaining and wonderfully illustrated volume details the efforts of approximately 50 males who set out to create their own unique, in-or-near-the-home "manspaces" to suit such passions as collecting, sports, electronics, music, painting, woodworking and arcane hobbies, or simply to create a new kind of private hangout.

When in-house space isn't available, these ingenious fellows even take to the backyard, as the author himself did, designing and building a 165-square-foot, fully functional office, only steps from his home life but worlds away in his mind. Some guys, like film and TV writer Bill Kerby, married in middle age, knew from the get-go that he'd never yield space to his new bride. The solution? They purchased a house with a backyard cabin, which he transformed into an arty, yet wholly masculine living quarters where his stuff abounds, including a classic old barber chair that his wife banished from the main house. ManSpace is a spectacular idea book with marvelous visuals and witty text, and it might just get a lot of guys to thinking. Definitely a cool gift item for that creative male who loves his stuff.


Martin Brady celebrates the holidays at his manspace in Nashville.

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