Sport

Woody Hayes was one of the greatest football coaches in history---and one of the most fascinating. More than a brilliant coach, he was a complicated, contradictory man. The former history teacher ran his football empire as an absolute monarchy, but had a surprisingly altruistic side, hidden from the public, . and author John Lombardo uses his extensive sports-writing experience to craft an accurate portrait of one of the most complex and fascinating figures in football.
First and foremost, Woody Hayes was a coach---and his achievements are stunning. While at Ohio State, he won five...

All In is the story of the greatest tournament in the world---the World Series of Poker--- from its humble beginnings in 1970 as a mere gathering of Texas road gamblers to its present status as a cultural phenomenon, attracting exhaustive national television coverage, legions of fans, and thousands of players.
Professional poker players themselves, authors Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback take an entertaining look at this unique experience, recounting its history through the breathtaking and sometimes brutal hands played at the Horseshoe's tables. They introduce the...

Tiger Woods, the world's greatest golfer, has switched teachers and everybody is talking about his new swing. There have been numerous changes to his technique since renowned author and golf instructor John Andrisani's bestselling The Tiger Woods Way hit the shelves in 1997. And the overall improvement in Woods' game has everyone asking the same question: what is he doing differently since switching to teaching guru Hank Haney and how can I use these lessons to improve my own game?

Drawing from interviews with golf instructors familiar with Tiger's swing, professional golfers...

"Keith Dunnavant's triumph is that he takes us into the heart of Alabama, into the darkness and the light, and there we see Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler, Ray Perkins, and their band of brothers play football for Bear Bryant the way life should be lived, at full throttle, indomitably."
---Dave Kindred, author of Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship

The Missing Ring is more than a football book. It is both a story of a changing era and of an extraordinary team on a championship quest.

Very few institutions in American sports can match the...

In The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors, Ian Frazier explores his lifelong passion for fishing, fish, and the aquatic world. He sees the angler's environment all around him--in New York's Grand Central Station, in the cement-lined pond of a city park, in a shimmering bonefish flat in the Florida Keys, in the trout streams of the Rocky Mountains. He marvels at the fishing in the turbid Ohio River by downtown Cincinnati, where a good bait for catfish is half a White Castle french fry. The incidentals of the angling experience, the who and the where of it, interest him...

In the spring of 2000, Harper's Magazine sent James McManus to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker, in particular the progress of women in the $23 million event, and the murder of Ted Binion, the tournament's prodigal host, purportedly done in by a stripper and her boyfriend. But when McManus arrives, the lure of the tables compels him to risk his entire Harper's advance in a long-shot attempt to play in the tournament himself. This is his deliciously suspenseful account of the tournament--the players, the hand-to-hand combat, his own unlikely progress in it--and the...

Why do fans live and die with their teams? For Yankee, Cowboy, and Laker fans the answer is fairly clear: the return on investment is relatively high. But why do people root so passionately for tragically inept teams like the Boston Red Sox, the Chicago Cubs, and the Philadelphia Phillies? Why do people organize their emotional lives around lackluster franchises such as the Cleveland Cavaliers, the San Diego Padres, and the Phoenix Suns, none of whom have ever won a single championship in their entire history? Is it pure tribalism? An attempt to maintain contact with one's vanished...

"Sullivan has found the transcendent in the horse."--Sports Illustrated

Winner of a 2004 Whiting Writers' Award

One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box. The answer came as a surprise. "I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was ... just beauty, you know?"

John Jeremiah Sullivan didn't know, not really-but he spent two years finding out, journeying from prehistoric caves to the Kentucky Derby in pursuit of what Edwin Muir called "our long-lost archaic...

A passionate and dramatic account of a year in the life of a city, when baseball and crime reigned supreme, and when several remarkable figures emerged to steer New York clear of one of its most harrowing periods.

By early 1977, the metropolis was in the grip of hysteria caused by a murderer dubbed "Son of Sam." And on a sweltering night in July, a citywide power outage touched off an orgy of looting and arson that led to the largest mass arrest in New York's history. As the turbulent year wore on, the city became absorbed in two epic battles: the fight between Yankee slugger...

The obvious audience for this book is professionals, scholars, and students in the recreation field. However, many of these entries relate to other fields of interest. . . . T]his work should find a place in academic libraries supporting curricula in recreation and related leisure studies. Reference Books Bulletin

The vocabulary and major concepts of the new field of recreation and leisure studies are just developing and this dictionary is the first major attempt to describe and systematize those concepts. Although university departments devoted to the study of...

Despite the increasing importance and politicization of sport, Western scholars have only recently begun to consider it as a subject worthy of serious study and research. Martin Vinokur contends that sport has become an increasingly pervasive and visibly central element in Western culture and that its function as a political tool is likely to grow still more in the 1990s, as governments realize the full value of sports to the political socialization process. He shows how the German Democratic Republic and Romania in particular have used sports to help achieve their political goals. This...

This volume expands the debate over the origins and purposes of sports records. Developing the thesis of Allen Guttmann, Carter and Kruger explore the history and meaning of quantitative sports records in several pre-modern societies. After introductions by Guttmann and the editors, the book proceeds on a chronological study of evidence of sports records in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, medieval England, the Renaissance, Tudor and Elizabethan England, pre-modern Hawaii, and pre-modern Japan. The chapters that follow are thematic essays on various aspects of sports records and Ritual and...

provide s] informative and entertaining browsing, depicting how filled our language is with sports metaphors, many of whose derivations are little known: the devil to pay, ' hazard a guess, ' red herring, ' etc. Even libraries with numerous other sports dictionaries will want this work. Recommended for high school, public, and academic libraries. Choice

This comprehensive dictionary brings together for the first time the popular words and expressions in American English that derive from terms associated with sports, games, and recreation. Many of these terms are now an...

From the gruff, sword-toting swashbucklers of the Middle Ages to modern adventure epics like The Princess Bride, the aura surrounding the sword is one that is both romantic and pragmatic. Thoughts of this weapon bring to mind images of the Knights of the Round Table, Zorro, the Three Musketeers--the things daydreams are made of. Historically, the fate of the empires revolved around the sword; nations rose and fell based on the power of their swordsmen. For centuries it was the weapon of choice in settling personal disputes. Today, the art of sword fighting has been incarnated as the...

John W. Heisman (1869-1936) was a man of many faces whose public image has suffered from a diffused, enigmatic, and mostly misunderstood private personality. Since his death the popular reception of the memorial trophy named in his honor has also obscured his identity. In singling out his many innovative contributions to the development of intercollegiate football, this book attempts to present a true picture of Heisman as both man and coach.

Because he coached at schools throughout the country during some of the most eventful years in our history, Heisman's life relates to significant...

The foremost sporting event in the world, the Olympic Games have grown from a quaint idea in the 1890s to a major world happening. This unique book shows the historical context in which each of the Olympic Games has taken place. Divided into sections on the Summer Games and the Winter Games, the book includes chronologically arranged entries on each of the games since 1896. Entries focus on such information as site selection, political questions, controversies, collateral events, changes in programming, and political and economic consequences of the games--all information that is not...

An impressive amount of literature, particularly literature on soccer and baseball, has appeared since Joseph Arbena's 1989 bibliography, "An Annotated Bibliography of Latin American Sport." This new bibliography includes titles published during the past decade as well as a few items omitted from the earlier bibliography. Arranged topically, it includes sections on indigenous traditions, Iberian background, the National Period in Middle America and in South America, and Hispanic sports and sportsmen in the United States.