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...

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. It is the toughest ticket in sports, with black-market tickets selling for $10,000 and more. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson, author of the bestselling Hogan, reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum façade of this famous Augusta course. And that heart belongs to the man who killed himself on the grounds ...

THE DEFINITIVE, CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED BOOK ABOUT FOOTBALL'Football conquered the world with its capacity to astonish, and this is its definitive history' The IndependentThere may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is t...

For more than eighty years, The New Yorker has been home to some of the toughest, wisest, funniest, and most moving sportswriting around. The Only Game in Town is a classic collection from a magazine with a deep bench, including such authors as Roger Angell, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and John McPhee. Hall of Famer Ring Lardner is here, bemoaning the lowering of standards for baseball achievement—in 1930. John Cheever pens a story about a boy’s troubled relationship with h...

This is Your Brain on Sports is the book for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and bestselling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take readers on a wild ride into the inner world of sports. Through the prism of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, they reveal the hidden influences and surprising cues that insp...

Football rivalry is a common factor anywhere in the world where the sport is played. But some take it far more seriously than others. In Sheffield, the traditional capital of Britain's steel manufacturing industry, there is no greater tribal divide than that between fans of Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday. The two clubs' supporters berate each other with a venomous passion, their long-running feud intense enough to divide families and workplaces from 1889 to the present day. But w...

“How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?”In the four years since Joe Nocera asked those questions in a controversial New York Times column, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Fans have begun to realize that the athl...

An irreverent testament to the millions of anglers who ever hooked something they oughta notta, lost a really big one, or told a whopperFishing is the No. 1 sport for fun—and spectacular snafus. Whether it’s a pro like Ray Scott or a presidential angler like George Bush, the deck is stacked to make buffoons of the best. So cast off on an ocean of hooks, lines, and stinkers as fishing guides, charter boat captains, game wardens, and weekend fishermen spill the wacky...

Originally published in 1976, James A. Michener’s explosive, spectacular Sports in America is a prescient examination of the crisis in American sports that is still unfolding to this day. Pro basketball players are banned for narcotics use, while a Major League pitcher is arrested for smuggling drugs across the Mexican border. The NFL’s “injury report” grows longer every Sunday. Corruption and recruiting violations plague collegiate sports as the “winning is everything” mentality ...

College football is a sport of rivalries—and no two teams were ever more perfectly matched than the Miami Hurricanes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. In Perfect Rivals, award-winning sportswriter Jeff Carroll takes us inside the locker rooms and onto the gridiron, as two storied programs with very different cultures battle for national supremacy, school pride, and the soul of the game itself.Beginning with the Hurricanes’ nationally televised 58–7 pasting of the Irish at the Oran...

'A must-have' - The Telegraph'Book of the Week' - The Independent'Hilarious' - Sport MagazineFrom the host of the Football Clichés podcast comes the hilarious and ever-relevant debut book.In what other context do football fans use the words 'aplomb' or 'derisory'? Why don't we use 'rifle' as a verb on the other six days of the week? Why do aggrieved midfielders feel the instinctive need to m...

In this masterpiece of sports reportage, Washington Post staff writer Mark Maske--one of the most respected journalists working both on and off the field--draws on unprecedented access to produce a behind-the-scenes look at the NFL's bitterest rivals: the Philadelphia Eagles, New York Giants, Washington Redskins, and Dallas Cowboys.Relentlessly reported from the leadership level, War Without Death delivers all the dramatic personality conflicts and unexpected chan...