The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly includes the best and worst teams and players of all time, the most clutch performances and performers, the biggest choke jobs and chokers, great comebacks and blown leads, plus overrated and underrated players and coaches.

Forget Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and Jerome Holtzman. According to author Steven Travers, Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times was the greatest sports columnist who ever lived—period. Known for his highly descriptive metaphors and phrasing—a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart, so painfully honest he could spot George Washington two answers in a lie detector test, the only pitcher I know who thinks of Homer as a Greek poet and not a lucky swing by a banjo hitter—Murray was a p...

Genuine fans take the best team moments with the less than great, and know that the games that are best forgotten make the good moments truly shine. This monumental book of the San Francisco 49ers documents all the best moments and personalities in the history of the team, but also unmasks the regrettably awful and the unflinchingly ugly. In entertaining—and unsparing—fashion, this book sparkles with 49ers highlights and lowlights, from wonderful and wacky memories to the famous and infamo...

In early 1969, New York City and all it represented was in disarray: politically, criminally, and athletically. But while Simon and Garfunkel lamented the absence of a sports icon like Joe DiMaggio, a modern Lancelot rode forth to lead the New York Mets to heights above and beyond all sports glory.This book tells the complete, unvarnished story of the great Tom Seaver, that rarest of all American heroes, the New York Sports Icon. In a city that produces not mere mortals but sports ...

From their origins as the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1884, through their departure from their beloved borough in 1957, to their record-breaking popularity in sunny Los Angeles, the Dodgers baseball team has been an unstoppable force in professional baseball for well over a century. The franchise has captured a record 21 National League titles, won six World Series championships, and produced dozens of Hall-of-Famers. The Dodgers revolutionized the sports landscape with the signing of Jackie Rob...

In this lively history of Southern California football, Steven Travers makes the case that under coach Pete Carroll (54-10), the Trojans have overtaken Notre Dame as the greatest ever collegiate tradition. USC has produced legendary gridiron coaches and stars. They have tied Notre Dame for the most national championships (11) and Heisman Trophy winners (seven); have the best bowl record, the most Rose Bowl victories, the most All-Americans, the most pro players, the most first round draft ...

Described by famed baseball scribe Roger Angell as looking like “a festive prison yard” during the 1962 World Series, Candlestick was loved and hated by sports teams and fans alike for its 43 years of existence. Built on a landfill above a garbage dump in a city rocked by an 8.6 earthquake only 54 years earlier, it was notorious for the tornadic winds that came off the bay, probably costing Willie Mays at least 100 career home runs. The fogs that rolled in looked like something God sent to...

Barry Bonds: Baseball Superman is the biography of the game's first four-time Most Valuable Player. In 2001, Bonds broke the greatest record in sports, the all-time single-season home run record held over the years by Babe Ruth, Roger Maris and Mark McGwire, and arguably had the greatest season in baseball history. There is no doubt that for most fans, Barry Bonds is a man of mystery. Author Steven Travers documents the superstar's 2001 campaign as Bonds defied the very bounds of conventio...

In the 1977 movie Oh, God!, George Burns, playing the deity, is asked to prove his divinity by performing a miracle. Burns replies, “The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea.”This book tells the tale of the single most impossible, unbelievable, and wonderful sports story of all time—of the 1969 “Amazin’ Mets” and their incredible spring, summer, and fall. But it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports...

In 1975, after his two Godfather epics, Francis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines to film Apocalypse Now. He scrapped much of the original script, a jingoistic narrative of U.S. Special Forces winning an unwinnable war. Harvey Keitel, originally cast in the lead role, was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen, who had a heart attack. An overweight Marlon Brando, paid a huge salary, did more philosophizing than acting. It rained almost every day and a hurricane wiped out t...

Nineteen sixty-two—it's been called “the end of innocence,” as America witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the following year saw the Kennedy assassination and the early stirrings of Vietnam.In baseball, 1962 was a thrilling season. Five years prior the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had migrated west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, leaving New York to the Yankees. In 1962, those same Giants and Dodgers faced off to see who would advance to the World Serie...

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