Tis' the season for last-minute, panicked, gift shopping or, alternatively, a rare chance to calm yourself, dig into a book you've just got or having been meaning to read, and actually finish it.
To serve both those aims we're introducing First Up's first "10 sports-ish books you can give with confidence or spend some quality with" . The full list will be out by Christmas Eve so you can get your shopping done. Feel free to provide your own recommendations in the comments section or via twitter: @michaelgrange.
We'll be back with the usual fare in 2011.
10. Where Men Win Glory
This came out in 2009 but I just picked up the paperback version which was published this past summer. Jon Krakauer has made a career writing about principled obsessives seeking to test their limits in a world that that often asks too little of them. This story about Pat Tillman, the defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals who enlisted in the military after 9/11 and became a reluctant American icon for his sacrifice, certainly qualifies. That he was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan and - as Krakauer precisely demonstrates - the details of his death systematically and even fraudulently covered up is disillusioning to be sure. But as I read through the biographical aspects of Tillman's past I couldn't help but feel angry at him on behalf of the loved ones he left behind, because a significant part of Tillman's motivation (it seems) was to put his hand on the stove and find out how "hot" war is. He was badly burned and the loved ones he left behind suffer as a result.
9. Facing Ali
You could spend your entire holiday reading Stephen Brunt books, or giving Stephen Brunt books, and do just fine either way -- Gretzky's Tears; Searching for Bobby Orr, even Diamond Dreams, his 20-year anniversary book on the early history of the Toronto Blue Jays -- all are well worth your time and money. But my favourite of his is this 2002 entry about 15 men who fought Muhammad Ali the greatest star in boxing history and quite possibly the most famous athlete of our time. Anyone who has ever written a book or dreamed of writing a book has stumbled on the question of how -- how do you get from the blank page to the last one? Most of us stop right there. Brunt decided to write 15 loosely connected set pieces, profiling 15 varied opponents in the form of stars like George Foreman and afterthoughts like Tunney Hunsaker; Ali's first professional opponent. The journey through the opponents provides shape to the great man's career arc and provides readers a convenient and pleasing new way into a story you may have thought you knew already.
8. The Best American Sports Writing of the Century
This compilation is just as the title suggests: a collection of significant writing by those that have shaped how some of the biggest and smallest moments in sports are viewed again or seen for the first time. An off-shoot of the annual Best American Sport Writing series edited by Glenn Stout (which I buy every year and often give as gifts), the best of the century collection is cool because you can open it up at random and find yourself reading a newspaper column on the about Babe Ruth's death by Grantland Rice in 1950 or Tom Wolfe writing a near novel about NASCAR star Junior Johnson for the pages of Esquire in 1965 or Gary Smith's seminal profile of Tiger Woods -- or maybe Earl Woods? -- for Sports Illustrated in 1996 or a whole collection of pieces on Muhammad Ali. I just read Richard Ben Cramer's profile of an ageing Ted Williams again the other night. It was incredible.
7. The Last Shot
This is a basketball classic, and a sports literature classic as Darcy Frey spends a year embedded with the Coney Island's Finest -- the stars of the Abraham Lincoln High basketball team -- as they manouver to use the sport as a ticket out from an impoverished and remote corner of New York City. Published in 1994 it has lasting relevancy beyond it's overall quality because among the stars on that Lincoln High team werea baby-faced Stephon Marbury, whose own peculiar rise and fall are foreshadowed here. But the real focus for the book is the other members of the team and in particular Russell Thomas, the team's senior star who struggles mightily to get the minimum SAT scores he needs to get into a Division I school and study for a career in nursing. Spoiler alert here -- Frey wrote a follow up story on his teenage subjects for the New York Times called Betrayed by the Game that serves as sad epilogue.
6. The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality
Jeff Pearlman has come up with a pretty good formula for writing about contemporary sports legends who would prefer not to have their less compelling sides written about: Interview everyone who could possibly know anything meaningful about the subject and collect as many anecdotes not previously known as possible and fit them in a working narrative. His Barry Bonds book: Love Me, Hate Me, the Making of an American Anti-hero is equally as good as this biography of Clemens, but I prefer this one because the Bonds book kind of proves what you already know: Bonds is a jerk. Clemens comes across as a bit of a moron, but Pearlman manages to finds a way to soften the edges, in particular his treatment of his youth growing up in Ohio and the ache he feels for his fallen brother is a pretty convincing explanation for Clemens' flaws. The chapters of the Blue Jays years are also full of interesting insights which we'll doubtless be hearing about more in court soon enough.
5. Like A Rose: A Celebration of Football
Most sports writers come to their craft as fans, which is true of most journalism: the essence of it is learning things you don't know and sharing it with others. But there is room and often magic in cases where the writer has inhabited the subject on an intimate level. Rick Telander played Big 10 football for Northwestern and had a taste of the pro game with the Kansas City Chiefs. The virus long been in his bloodstream and encouraged him to write this quirky little meditation on the nature of the sport and his place in it. My favourite thread involves his son Zach taking to the game and the thrill he gets as a parent watching him play and the dread he feels knowing the brutal heart of the sport he loves that lies ahead.
4. Long Distance: A year of living strenuously
Anyone who enjoys sports but is dragged down by things like family, jobs, life and the rest of it has probably had some variation of the thought: if only I didn't have a job, family, life and the rest of it to deal with, I could really be good at such and such; I could reach my potential!
It's an alluring thought, full of promise but without the risk of actually realizing that your (imagined) potential might actually be not all that great. Which is why I enjoyed this book by Bill McKibben, who took time away from writing about some seriously serious topics (like the end of earth as we know it) to train as a cross-country skier full-time for a year. The year coincided with the grave illness of his father, which added another dimension to what is essentially a tale of self-exploration, with plenty of detail on ski wax, but a fantasy too.
3. My Losing Season
I've read a lot of sports books but I've never read anything that captures the fire that breathes inside those athletes that burn to succeed and brood at the near inevitable failure -- there is only one winner, afterall -- than this memoir by novelist Pat Conroy of his time playing point guard at The Citadel in the mid-1960s. We write about winners and expect to learn from them, but most athletes fail. This book resonated personally given I played university basketball on some bad teams and in some ways have never forgiven myself for all the losing, but that never made me love the game any less. Conroy sums it up much better than I ever could: "Losing tears along the seam of your own image of yourself. It is a mark of shame that causes internal injury, but no visible damage...yet I wish to be clear, I have loved nothing on this earth as I did the sport of basketball."
2. Andre Agassi: Open
The reason you read sports autobiographies is for the detail. If you care enough to read the book you've probably watched the games, or are familiar with the outcome. What you want is all the details that explain the outcome; and hopefully the person who suffered or triumphed by the result. As a sports writer you're always seeking that detail, but the reality of space and time constraints are that if you got all that detail your head would explode. Athletes know this and are aware too much detail or a little detail out of context runs the risk of misinterpretation. Hence the cliché and the appetite for books - or any written form - that transcend them. It's the detail that jumps out from the pages of Agassi's autobiography. While all the publicity centred on his brief foray into recreational drug use; the satisfaction in the reading of his epic tale - it's like someone took the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcom Gladwell and torqued it with amphetamines - is in the detail, and quality of the writing. His description of how the athletic trainer at the US Open ministers to his feet before a big match -- "getting these dogs ready for war" -- is worth the cover price alone.
1. The Game
It says something about a book if you remember where you were when you read it: I was given Ken Dryden's professional hockey memoir for Christmas in 1985 and I read it in about eight hours. As a kid I watched the 1970s Canadiens teams decimate the NHL and was fascinated by the likes of Yvon Cournoyer and Guy Lapointe. I was shocked when Ken Dryden took a year away from hockey to study law, but somehow understood it to be an honourable thing to do; after all, school was important, and Bunny Laroque had a cooler name for ball hockey purposes. Reading about those teams and that life as an adult was a powerful experience that would likely be difficult to replicate: you're only a kid once and there was only one dynasty like the Canadiens; and they just happened to have a worthy, literary-minded goalie with a lot of time on his hands to make observations about his life, his team and hockey. But it was very weird, nonetheless, as the childhood innocence was rubbed away by the reality that a job is a job, and co-workers were co-workers, even in the NHL: Dryden sat three seats from Guy Lafluer for nearly eight seasons - and they weren't friends? They didn't hang out? Scotty Bowman wasn't that nice? Read it again today and the weirdness is its status as a period piece: Dryden reflecting on the transition of sports into Sport Inc. and the impact of 'big money' on the game; the way the weight room was used mostly for pre-game backgammon. It still reads well, though. Incredibly well. I'm going to read it again this Christmas.
Other worthy reads: Moneyball by Michael Lewis; A Good Walk Spoiled, by John Feinstein; The Micacle of St. Anthony by Adrien Wojnarowski; Playing with Fire by Theo Fleury; Playing for Keeps by David Halberstam: Namath by Mark Kriegel; King of the World by David Remnick; Seven Seconds or Less, by Jack McCallum, LeafsAbomination, by Dave Feschuk and, um, me; A Season in Dornoch by Lorne Rubenstein. The list could go on, obviously.