From the always astonishing Karl Ove Knausgaard—a brilliantly unusual book to delight both reading sports fans and the literary world. Bridging the two worlds of soccer and great writing, in the tradition of Lewis's Moneyball**, Hornby's** Fever Pitch or Buford's Among the Thugs**, Knausgaard provides us with a die-hard fan's impassioned, personal, quirky, entertaining musings on...

Is Italy a united country, or a loose affiliation of warring states? Is Italian football (which we Americans know as “soccer”) a sport, or an ill-disguised protraction of ancient enmities? After twenty years in the bel paese, Tim Parks goes on the road to follow the fortunes of his hometown soccer club, Hellas Verona, to pay a different kind of visit to some of the world’s most beautiful cities, and to get a fresh take on the conundrum that is national character.From Udine ...

Written by one of the most revered surfers of his generation, Gerry Lopez's Surf Is Where You Find It is a collection of stories about a lifetime of surfing. But more than that, it is a collection of stories about the lessons learned from surfing. It presents 38 stories about those who have been influential in the sport — surfing anytime, anywhere, and in any way. Lopez, an innovator in stand-up-paddle (one of the fastest growing water sports in the world), now shares his stories ...

WWE Legends gives fans an inside look at more than fifty of the greatest wrestlers ever to slip between the ropes and enter the “squared circle.”They were World Heavyweight Champions: Bob Backlund, Superstar Billy Graham, and Bruno Sammartino. They were fan favorites: “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka, Chief Jay Strongbow, and Andre the Giant. They were the villains everyone loved to hate: Killer Kowalski, Ernie Ladd, and the Fabulous Moolah. They were ethnic heroes,...

Dan Ford learned to fly at the age when most men are well into retirement. In this short book, he tells how it was to have a flight instructor one-third his age, to make a Sentimental Journey to the Pennsylvania airport where the Piper Cub first saw the light of day, to practice spins and aerobatic turns in a Great Lakes biplane, to fly low and slow in New Jersey, to make a leisurely tour around Lake Winnipesaukee and into his past, and to have a close encounter with the National Defense E...

In The ESPN Mighty Book of Sports Knowledge, Steve Wulf, acclaimed author and founding editor of ESPN The Magazine, delivers an arena’s worth of sporting wisdom, trivia, best-of lists, curiosities, legendary feats, and sacred objects–from the magic of Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the lore of hockey’s Stanley Cup to the art of the perfectly thrown Wiffle Ball pitch. Written to remind us all why we love the games, this indispensable reference features contributio...

Training for and completing a triathlon is one of the most grueling life experiences anyone can have, requiring a degree of personal commitment, individual strength and iron will that few people possess. A true test of your ability to find, and then surpass your physical, mental and emotional limits, the only real analogue to triathlon…is the challenge of life itself.In Finding Triathlon, professional athlete Scott Tinley explores the world inside and outside endurance spo...

A "hilarious and utterly irreverent tale" (Irvine Welsh) of a year in the life of an abrasive pee-wee soccer coachGrowing up in Scotland, Alan Black learned that soccer was no mere game; it was a matter of life or death. In this harshly hilarious tale, Black, a Glasglow transplant living in suburban California, coaches the Dragons, a peewee team that proves an embarrassment to his beloved sport. They're pampered. They're soft. They've been told by their overprotect...

Nonfiction films about sports have been around for decades, yet few scholarly articles have been published on these works. In Identity and Myth in Sports Documentaries, editors Zachary Ingle and David M. Sutera have assembled a collection of essays that show how myth and identity—national, religious, ethnic, and racial—are constructed, perpetuated, or questioned in documentaries produced in the United States, France, Australia, Germany, and Japan.This collection is divided into thr...

There's a battle being fought. It's raging on the sports fields, in the newsrooms and behind the scenes at every major broadcaster. Women in sport are fighting for equality with more vigour than ever, but are they breaking down the barriers that stand in their way?Sarah Shephard looks behind the headlines to see whether progress is really being made and tells the stories that can no longer be ignored. It's time for women to switch their focus from the battlefield t...

"A sparkling sampler of commentaries from celebrated sports journalist Frank Deford . . . offers a kaleidoscope of sports highs and lows." — Midwest Book ReviewFrank Deford (1938–2017) was one of the most beloved sports journalists in America. A contributing writer to Sports Illustrated for more than fifty years, and a longtime correspondent on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, in his dotage Deford was perhaps best known for his weekly comm...

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way."Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington PostNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant...