Best sport books

[Liam]

Since we haven't had one of these for a long time, if at all.

So yeah, what are people's favourite books on sport that they have read?

Will add mine in a little while.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

I don't actually get many non-fiction books, especially autobiographies. I do want some cycling ones though but not Lance Armstrong or anyone who won stuff like Eddie Mercx....I want a book from a cycling nobody.

Kriss Akabusi's book was far better than it could have been.

[METALMAN]

Alex Ferguson's autobiography is an obvious one. It's fantastic.

Roy Keane's autobiography is really good too.

Nick Faldo's is wonderful.

My favourite sports book however is 'A Season With Verona' by Tim Parks. It's all about the hooliganism and craziness of Italian fans as he follows Verona about for a season. It's an excellent book.

I also like those books that are just lots of random funny stories. Can't remember any off the top of my head though.

[Liam]

'Friday Night Lights' is brilliant, and probably my favourite. Brilliant look at small town America, and the emphasis placed on the college football team. A book that I think you don't need to be into American Football to necessarily get enjoyment out of, either.

I have two Brian Clough books that I like, one being 'The Damned United' (fiction, and has been decried recently by some, but a good book nonetheless) and the other being 'Provided You Don't Kiss Me', which is a look at Clough through the eyes of a local news reporter. Both well worth a look, as Clough was a great character.

'Got Fight? The 50 Zen Principles Of Hand To Face Combat' by Forrest Griffin is also well worth a look. Essentially a very random book, it is made a worthwhile read due to Forrest being batshit insane and hilariously funny for the most part.

[Guest Spongebob Weinstein]

Whether you're a hockey fan or not, "The Game" by Ken Dryden (former Montreal goalie, now an MP) is the best hockey book ever written.

Stephen Brunt is a great writer - I'd recommend "Facing Ali" to anyone interested in boxing - and his new book, "Gretzky's Tears" is something I'm going to be asking for for Christmas for sure. It's the story of Wayne Gretzky's trade from Edmonton to Los Angeles, which was genuinely the biggest news story in Canada for a few days, and a real turning point for the game of hockey.

Sticking with Brunt, "Diamond Dreams" is the best book ever written about the Toronto Blue Jays (and I've read pretty much all of them), but it's from 1996 and I kind of wish he'd write a sequel about some of the stuff that's happened since then.

Other than those books, most of my favourites are biographies, and hockey ones at that...Roger Neilson, Patrick Roy, Martin Brodeur, Dick Irvin...

And to throw in an MMA bone, Jonathan Snowden's "Total MMA" is a great book for anybody who wants to learn about the history of MMA, plus it's pretty recent (goes up to Lesnar/Herring).

[NobBe Nobbs]

The Brodeur biography is doing the reverse of growing on me. There's a lot of stuff that's filler - the most obvious bit is when he discusses the 2006/2007 playoff run, which turns into "Martin Brodeur talks about movies" - as well as some snide, rather "political" bits I didn't appreciate and the style can be quite dry, making some bits difficult to get through. It's bad, but it's not as good as I used to think it was.

[Guest Spongebob Weinstein]

It's not great, but there is some good stuff in there - the '98 Olympics for example - and I read it immediately after "Money Players" or whatever the name of that Bruce Dowbiggen book is, which is horrendously dry, so Brodeur's might have seemed better by comparison.

[Mysterio2000X]

.. What does it say about me that I assumed this was talking about gambling?

[Emperor Fuckshit]

I think my favourite sports book is still "The Historical Baseball Abstract." I guess it's rather easier for a book to be "so many things at once" when it's a thousand pages long. But nevertheless, the HBA is as good an introduction to the game as one could possibly want. It also nicely gives lie to the idea that baseball writers are placed in two opposing camps -- the "traditionalist" stat-haters who focus on the human interest angles, and the "new school" of SABR-influenced robot-lovers. The book also contains some of Bill James' shit-headed right-wing political commentary. But only about two articles worth in a book of, as mentioned, A THOUSAND CUNTING PAGES. Some of the theory behind Win Shares -- and particularly its defensive component -- has been criticised convincingly since the publication of James' works on the subject. But I think that HBA is a great place to start with the statistical side of baseball, and a decent place to start with the game in general.

I'd recommend to any Red Sox fans the volume "Impossible Dreams", which is edited by Glenn Stout. It contains a collection of newspaper pieces from Boston writers, spanning the entirety of the twentieth century. There are some fantastic pieces, including the incredibly moving "A Postcard from My Brother" by Steve Buckley, an amusingly disdainful piss-take of clueless fans by Ring Lardner (yes, that Ring Lardner) from 1911, and Roger Angell's gorgeously zeitgeisty piece about the 1967 run. There's also a short "it was better in my day" grumble from Cy Young. Which is awesome on so many levels -- i) it's CY YOUNG, ii) he's writing a newspaper article for some reason, iii) a guy is getting pissed off about the pampered young professionals in 1945!!!!! Oddly, John Updike's "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" is absent -- Williams' retirement is chronicled by Ed Linn, and the Updike piece featured is a picturesque little nugget about listening to baseball on the radio. One of the best things about the collection is just observing the evolution of the journalistic form. The early pieces tend simply to be detailed game reports, their writers apparently unaware that these events exist within a larger narrative. Even the reports of the three championship-clinching games from the deadball era feature no sense that the incidents being described are Historic Moments. Pieces dealing with the later pennants -- 1967, 1975 and 1986 -- seem constantly to be grappling with not only the games in question but their place in canon. And that's before you consider the extensive stylistic differences observable over time.

For other baseball stuff, I love the volumes of Roger Angell's writing. He's just a lot of a fun to read. His "Game Time" collection features the excellent Spring Training report "Put Me in, Skip!" as well as a nice piece on the Angels-Giants world series (2002, was that?)

I have never read "Moneyball". I probably should. That and "Ball Four."

As far as cricket goes, Simon Hughes' first two autobiographies are both tremendous fun -- he seems like a nice guy. "A Lot of Hard Yakka" is a fairly standard account of his career with Middlesex and Durham; "Yakking Around the World" deals with the life of an English cricketer during winter, playing club cricket in various Test nations.

And for anyone who has an interest in both cricket and far-Left politics, there's always "Beyond a Boundary" of course.

I've read fewer football books. But my Dad recently lent me his copy of "Behind the Curtain", which is a nice account of football in Eastern Europe since the USSR's dissolution. And Nick Hancock's "What Didn't Happen Next" is one of the funniest books written about anything ever.

Edited October 22, 2009 by Emperor Fuckshit

[METALMAN]

I hate myself for forgetting What Didn't Happen Next.

[Guest Spongebob Weinstein]

"Ball Four" is good. "Moneyball" is overrated because most fans took it to mean "Billy Beane is a god and his methods should be emulated by all GMs even if they don't understand them", rather than "it's possible to get real value for money even with the enormous salaries paid out to baseball players".

[Emperor Fuckshit]

MM -- I hate you for forgetting "What Didn't Happen Next".

MPH -- I agree that a lot of people have misunderstood "Moneyball". Certain people have taken it to be a book which advocates cultish idolatory of Billy Beane. Other people -- and this is more common, I think -- have seen it as a book which advocates acquiring players of a certain type (college pitchers, low-velocity nibblers, fat guys, short guys, guys who get on base, slow guys, home-run hitters etc.). I don't really think that that makes the book over-rated, though. If anything, it means that certain people have under-rated the book, because they think that -- say -- Jeremy Brown never having been a successful Major Leaguer "gives lie" to its theories. Possibly that has created a reaction in which other people feel the need still to venerate "Moneyball" as a way of sounding out the haters, thereby over-rating it. So I'd say it's more just "misunderstood" than "over-rated" -- although as I say, I haven't read it, and am basing this opinion from secondary sources that I have been exposed to since its writing.

Edited October 22, 2009 by Emperor Fuckshit

[Guest Spongebob Weinstein]

I'd agree with that, actually - 'misunderstood' instead of 'overrated'. It doesn't give you the feeling that you're reading something revolutionary, the way Bill James does, but it is neat to see the inside glimpses of the A's organization and how fundamentally different it is from any peeks other books have shown us of other baseball front offices. Likewise the mini-biographies of players like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, who don't exactly have the typical "star high school athlete, rises through the minors fast, maybe turns to drugs in a poignant moment" narrative.

[therockbox]

"Inverting the Pyramid" by Jonathan Wilson. Looks at the evolution of football tactics in all the various cultures, and focuses on some of the most influential figures in the games development (Victor Maslov's 'invention' of pressing, Jimmy Hogan, Lobanovskyi etc.) There's also some good stuff about the English attitude towards the foreign methods and the reluctance to use them over here, and how slow we've been generally to adapt to technical and tactical advances in the game.

[Emperor Fuckshit]

MPH--

The thing is, I guess, that if you try to describe what "Moneyball" is really about, then you're basically left with just the theory of "sign good players wot other teams think are crap." That sounds much too obvious to either be revolutionary or interesting to read about. But apparently it was enough of a useful guiding principle to net Oakland repeated division titles with a tiny payroll.

One interesting criticism of the book, though, is that concurrently with Beane, the Minnesota GM Terry Ryan was doing equally-fantastic things on a comparable budget. No-one is making a movie about Terry Ryan. Perhaps Ryan's methodology just wasn't as exciting or as received-wisdom-busting or as easy to describe as a coherent "theory", and so was harder to make into a "story". But the dude got results.

TRB--

That sounds awesome. I love reading the Wikipedia articles on tactical philosophies and formations and the history behind those things. Catenaccio in particular I find fascinating for some reason. A book written by a person who actually know what he's talking about might be EVEN BETTER.

Edited October 22, 2009 by Emperor Fuckshit