Books, Sports, Miscellaneous, History of Sports

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Jeff Pearlman
Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty
by Harper (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-09-16)

They were America's Team—the high-priced, high-glamour, high-flying Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s, who won three Super Bowls and made as many headlines off the field as on it. Led by Emmitt Smith, the charismatic Deion "Prime Time" Sanders, and Hall of Famers Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin, the Cowboys rank among the greatest of all NFL dynasties. In similar fashion to his New York Times bestseller The Bad Guys Won!, about the 1986 New York Mets, in Boys Will Be Boys, award-winning writer Jeff Pearlman chronicles the outrageous antics and dazzling talent of a team fueled by ego, sex, drugs—and unrivaled greatness. Rising from the ashes of a 1–15 season in 1989 to capture three Super Bowl trophies in four years, the Dallas Cowboys were guided by a swashbuckling, skirt-chasing, power-hungry owner, Jerry Jones, and his two eccentric, hard-living coaches, Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer. Together the three built a juggernaut that America loved and loathed. But for a team that was ...

Frank Gifford, Peter Richmond
The Glory Game: How the 1958 NFL Championship Changed Football Forever
by Harper (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-11-04)

In 1958 Frank Gifford was the golden boy on the glamour team in the most celebrated city in the NFL. When his New York Giants played the Baltimore Colts for the league championship that year, it became the single most memorable contest in the history of professional football. Broadcast to an audience of millions, it was the first title game ever to go into sudden-death overtime. Its drama, excitement, and controversy riveted the nation and helped propel football to the forefront of the American sports landscape. Now, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of "The Greatest Game Ever Played," New York Giants Hall of Famer and longtime television analyst Frank Gifford provides an inside-the-helmet account that will take its place in the annals of sports literature. Drawing on the poignant and humorous memories of every living player from the game—including fellow Hall of Famers Sam Huff, Andy Robustelli, Art Donovan, Lenny Moore, and Raymond Berry—as well as the author's own ...

Mark Frost
Match, The: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever
by Hyperion (Paperback) (Release Date: 2009-03-17)

"It's difficult to beat a good golf book, be it a good yarn or a picture book . . . The golf is spectacular, the course more so, the descriptions luminous." --USA Today "The untold story of golf's greatest money match, featuring Hogan and Nelson at Cypress Point, comes to life in . . . Mark Frost's gripping new book, The Match." --Golf magazine "Frost weaves an exceptional narrative . . . It's a gripping tale--as good as James Patterson, John Grisham, or any other contemporary novelist could create. And all true. The match comes down to the 18th hole, and you'll be the winner once you turn the last page." --Met Golfer "Frost masterfully puts the reader not just on the scene, but in the time, too, with terrific storytelling." --The State (South Carolina) "Frost captures an elusive magic in this improbable matchup and what it meant for those who played and witnessed it." --Publishers Weekly "The Match was a dream I never thought would come true. If I hadn't been ...

Mark Bowden
The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL
by Atlantic Monthly Press (Hardcover)

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the NFL Championship game. Played in front of sixty-four thousand fans and millions of television viewers around the country, the game would be remembered as the greatest in football history. On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry. An estimated forty-five million viewers—at that time the largest crowd to have ever watched a football game—tuned in to see what would become the first sudden-death contest in NFL history. It was a battle of the league's best offense—the Colts—versus its best defense—the Giants. And it was a contest between the blue-collar Baltimore team versus the glamour boys of the Giants squad. The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a ...

Sports Illustrated: The Football Book
by Sports Illustrated (Hardcover)

On the heels of the successful Sports Illustrated 50th Anniversary Book comes a spectacular celebration of professional football that will be treasured by fans of America+s Game. With the same kind of unforgettable photographs and award-winning writing that made the SI+s 50th Anniversary Book a best-seller, this lavish coffee-table volume brings to life the bone-rattling action of NFL football and the extraordinary athletes who have made it America+s true national pastime. In 256 oversized pages, The Football Book commemorates the dynasties and the dominating players, the crucial plays and classic games, the personalities and performances that propelled the NFL during SI+s first 50 years of publication, from a marginal, ragtag league to the biggest game in town.

Jack Cavanaugh
Giants Among Men: How Robustelli, Huff, Gifford, and the Giants Made New York a Football Town and Changed the NFL
by Random House (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2008-10-07)

From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, when basketball’s Boston Celtics were piecing together a run for the ages, when Montreal’s Canadiens were in the midst of notching a record-setting five straight Stanley Cups, and when the New York Yankees were the once-and-future kings of the diamond, one team boosted the NFL to national prominence as none other: the New York Giants. In Giants Among Men, Jack Cavanaugh, the acclaimed author of Tunney, transports us to the NFL’s golden age to introduce the close-knit and diverse group that won the heart of a city, helped spread the gospel of pro football across the nation, and recast the NFL as a media colossus. Central to Cavanaugh’s narrative, and emblematic of the Giants’ bond with their followers, was a hard-nosed future Hall of Fame defensive end named Andy Robustelli. A World War II combat vet, a graduate of Arnold College, undersized and nearing age thirty, Robustelli nevertheless anchored a Giants defensive unit so ...

The Best American Sports Writing 2008 (The Best American Series)
by Houghton Mifflin (Paperback)

In this exciting new collection, William Nack, veteran sportswriter and author of the classic Secretariat, honors the year's finest sports journalism and thus upholds the tradition that began seventeen years ago, with David Halberstam at the helm. In these pages, you will find the most provocative, compelling, tragic, and triumphant moments in sports from 2007, captured by the knights of the keyboard who make sports come alive for us day after day, week after week, year after year. Here you'll find Paul Solotaroff's excellent and uncompromising take on the neglect that a growing number of crippled NFL players continually face from the NFL players' union. Jeanne Marie Laskas's "G-L-O-R-Y!" offers a rousing inside look at the pregame rituals of the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders. A riveting online diary by Wright Thompson reveals a bleak and merciless landscape in China, which that country's government would rather not have the world see during preparations for the Olympics. Nack ...

David Goldblatt
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer
by Riverhead Trade (Paperback)

The definitive book about soccer. With a new foreword for the American edition. There 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 the World Cup final. In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself. Questions for David Goldblatt Amazon.com: There's a sentence in the middle of The Ball Is Round that to me sums up a great deal of the culture of football. After noting that Pelé had scored nearly a ...

Maurice Isserman, Stewart Weaver
Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes
by Yale University Press (Hardcover)

The first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa teammate Tenzing Norgay is a familiar saga, but less well known are the tales of many other adventurers who also came to test their skills and courage against the world’s highest and most dangerous mountains. In this lively and generously illustrated book, historians Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver present the first comprehensive history of Himalayan mountaineering in fifty years. They offer detailed, original accounts of the most significant climbs since the 1890s, and they compellingly evoke the social and cultural worlds that gave rise to those expeditions. The book recounts the adventures of such figures as Martin Conway, who led the first authentic Himalayan climbing expedition in 1892; Fanny Bullock Workman, the pioneer explorer of the Karakoram range; George Mallory, the romantic martyr of Mount Everest fame; Charlie Houston, who led American expeditions to K2 in the 1930s and ...

John Carlin
Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation
by Penguin Press HC, The (Hardcover)

A thrilling, inspiring account of one of the greatest charm offensives in history—Nelson Mandela’s decade-long campaign to unite his country, beginning in his jail cell and ending with a rugby tournamentIn 1985, Nelson Mandela, then in prison for twenty-three years, set about winning over the fiercest proponents of apartheid, from his jailers to the head of South Africa’s military. First he earned his freedom and then he won the presidency in the nation’s first free election in 1994. But he knew that South Africa was still dangerously divided by almost fifty years of apartheid. If he couldn’t unite his country in a visceral, emotional way—and fast—it would collapse into chaos. He would need all the charisma and strategic acumen he had honed during half a century of activism, and he’d need a cause all South Africans could share. Mandela picked one of the more farfetched causes imaginable—the national rugby team, the Springboks, who would host the sport’s World ...

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