Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Sports

The companion book to the PBS television special of the same name, For Gold and Glory retraces the little-known history of the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes. This highly celebrated auto-racing event for African Americans was held in Indiana and throughout the Midwest during the racial turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s, when the Ku Klux Klan cast a shadow over the social and political landscape of the state and region. The story is told through the eyes and emotions of Indianapolis auto mechanic Charlie Wiggins. The greatest African American driver of the era, Wiggins was known as the ""Negro...

From the 1930s to the 1980s, the capital of weightlifting in America was York, Pennsylvania, the home of the York Barbell Company. Bob Hoffman, the founder of York Barbell, propagated an ideology of success for Americans seeking physical improvement. Often called the "Father of World Weightlifting," Hoffman was a pioneer in marketing barbells and health foods. He popularized weight training and inaugurated a golden age of American weightlifting. Muscletown USA--part biography, part business history, and part sports history--chronicles how Hoffman made York the mecca of manly...

Charles Albert Bender was one of baseball's most talented pitchers. By the end of his major league career in 1925, he had accrued 212 wins and more than 1,700 strikeouts, and in 1953, he became the first American Indian elected to baseball's Hall of Fame. But as a high-profile Chippewa Indian in a bigoted society, Bender knew firsthand the trauma of racism. In Money Pitcher: Chief Bender and the Tragedy of Indian Assimilation, William C. Kashatus offers the first biography of this compelling and complex figure.

Bender's career in baseball began on the sandlots of...

Despite the thirst for more information about women's golf, very little exists about its history outside of books about the legendary Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Hudson fills this void, offering a complete history of women in golf. He focuses on the fascinating development of women's golf, the creation of the women's tour, star athletes of the past, the astronomical rise of the present-day tour greats, and the future of the sport.

Golf may well have replaced baseball as America's pastime, and the sport enjoys incredible popularity across the globe. At the professional level,...

Many legendary men have been associated with University of Texas football, but for most fans one man will always be "Coach"--Darrell K Royal. One of the most successful coaches in college football, Royal led the Longhorns to three national championships and eleven Southwest Conference titles during his twenty years (1956-1976) as UT's head coach. He coached some of the Horns' best players, including future Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell, and was named NCAA Coach of the Year three times. In 1969, an ABC-TV poll of sportswriters called Royal the Coach of the Decade. In 1996 UT...

Winner, Robert Peterson Recognition Award, 2008

Willie Wells was arguably the best shortstop of his generation. As Monte Irvin, a teammate and fellow Hall of Fame player, writes in his foreword, "Wells really could do it all. He was one of the slickest fielding shortstops ever to come along. He had speed on the bases. He hit with power and consistency. He was among the most durable players I've ever known." Yet few people have heard of the feisty ballplayer nicknamed "El Diablo." Willie Wells was black, and he played long before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier....

In 1963, Willi Unsoeld became an international hero for his conquest of the West Ridge of Everest. A charismatic professor of philosophy, Unsoeld was one of the greatest climbers of the twentiethth century, a man whose raw physical power and casual fearlessness inspired a generation of adventurers.

In 1976, during an expedition to Nanda Devi, the tallest peak in India, Unsoeld's philosophy of spiritual growth through mortal risk was tragically tested. The outcome of that expedition continues to fuel one of the most fascinating debates in mountaineering history.

Fatal...

This is the first collection of dramatic, first-person accounts of commercial fishing written by the men and women who work in the nation's most dangerous occupation. Nineteen diverse fisher-writers, from the famous to the unknown, take the reader swordfish harpooning on the Georges Banks, winter crabbing in the Bering Sea, sea-urchin diving off Maine, herring fishing in Alaska, shark-harpooning off Scotland and points between. Together, they plumb the extremes of living, working, and sometimes dying at sea, creating the most intensely personal portrait of fishing and fishermen to...

In California, a team of talented young men begin pursuing the most elusive dream in sports, the Olympic Games. The pressure steadily increases as two best friends (a mentor and his protege) reach the top of the world rankings and unexpectedly find themselves direct competitors. Their teammates include an emerging star methodically plotting to retrace his father's path to Olympic glory, as well as a super-extraordinary athlete desperate to walk away from it all. Led by one of the most passionate coaches in sports, a brilliant and explosive strategist on a personal quest for redemption,...