Walk into Hinkle Fieldhouse, and you feel it--that palpable sense of history known as the Hinkle mystique. Indiana's basketball cathedral has stood in all its glory at Butler University since 1928. John Wooden, Oscar Robertson and Larry Bird played on its floor. Jesse Owens sprinted to a record at Hinkle, and athletes from around the globe have brought Olympic-level competition to crowds gathered under its steel arches. It was the setting for the climactic scene in Hoosiers, arguably the g...

From America’s premier sportswriter, the definitive, #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Joe Paterno and the story of America’s love affair with football.Joe Paterno believed that football was a way to teach young men how to live. He coached at Penn State for sixty-two years. During his years as a head coach, his teams won 409 games, a Division I record. At the end of his life, more than one hundred of those wins were invalidated by the NCAA because...

Butler University in Indianapolis became the smallest school in 40 years to reach the NCAA championship game. Prior to the tournament, a statistician calculated the Bulldogs as a 200-to-1 shot to win. But as fascinating as what Butler accomplished was how they did it. Underdawgs tells the incredible and uplifting story.Butler’s coach, 33-year-old Brad Stevens, looked so young he was often mistaken for one of the players, but he had quickly become one of the best coaches in...

Based on dozens of shocking interviews with some of the most influential names in sports, this is the urgent and revelatory examination of racial inequality in professional athletics America has been waiting for.Commentators, coaches, and fans alike have long touted the diverse rosters of leagues like the NFL and MLB as sterling examples of a post-racial America. Yet decades after Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a display of Black power and pride...

The author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass returns with "a knuckleball ride through the wonderful and wacky year . . . the national pastime changed forever" ( Kirkus Reviews).America, 1976: colorful, complex, and combustible. It was a year of Bicentennial celebrations and presidential primaries, of Olympic glory and busing riots, of "killer bees" hysteria and Pong fever. On the baseball diamond, Thurman Munson led the New York Yankees to their first ...

TAKE THEM OUT OF THE BALL GAME–PLEASE!From star running back Bryon “Bam” Morris’s interesting (and totally illegal) sideline career to the 1950s Kansas City A’s sneaky relationship with the New York Yankees; from French golfer Jean Van de Velde’s epic choke on 18 at the 1999 British Open to the infamous Cleveland Ten-Cent Beer Night riot of 1974; from Hungary’s bloody 1956 Olympic water polo match with the Soviet Union to the definitive analysis of basketball coach Larry Brown’s sa...

From award-winning Boston Herald sports columnist Steve Buckley comes Wicked Good Year, an insightful, celebratory look at Boston's mega-successful 2007-2008 sports season, during which the Red Sox swept the World Series, the Patriots went undefeated during the regular season, and the Celtics won the NBA Championship. Wicked Good Year looks at the three teams through the eyes of the players, coaches, and team personnel and also a variety of personalities and fans...

The Deadball Era (1901û1920) is a baseball fanÆs dream. Hope and despair, innocence and cynicism, and levity and hostility blended then to create an air of excitement, anticipation, and concern for all who entered the confines of a major league ballpark. Cheating for the sake of victory earned respect, corrupt ballplayers fixed games with impunity, and violence plagued the sport. Spectators stormed the field to attack players and umpires, ballplayers charged the stands to pummel hecklers, ...

Friday Night Lights meets The Bad News Bears in “a brisk, warmhearted reminder of how professional sports can occasionally reach stunning unprofessional depths” (Publishers Weekly): the first two seasons with the worst team in NFL history, the hapless, hilarious, and hopelessly winless 1976–1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did something no NFL team had ever done before ...

A centennial celebration of the Boston Red Sox's home stadium and the city's historical landmark.Fenway Park evokes a team and a sport that have become more synonymous with a city's identity than any stadium or arena in the country. The park's instantly recognizable confines have seen some of the most dramatic happenings in baseball history, including Carlton Fisk's "Is it fair?" home run in the 1975 World Series and Ted Williams's perfectly scripted long ball in h...

This entertaining history blends anecdote, incident, and analysis as it chronicles the story of our national pastime.Charles C. Alexander covers the advent of the first professional baseball leagues, the game's surge in the early twentieth century, the Golden Twenties and the Gray Thirties, the breaking of the color line in the late forties, and the game's expansion to its current status as a premier team sport. He describes changing playing styles and outstanding ...

"Charley Rosen has undertaken the challenge of documenting the latest and greatest history of the game professionally--and has done so to great success. . . . . When I finished the book it seemed as if I had gone through another season, injuries and all. . . . Rosen skillfully leads readers through the NBA's first steps along its journey toward what it has become today.”--Phil Jackson, from the Foreword"Rosen, a wonderful sportswriter . . . had forgotten mor...