On the face of it, a diary of the 1969 season by a second-string pitcher for the Seattle Pilots baseball team, the only year that team existed, does not leap to the top of the to-read pile. But this book is not on this list because of just one chapter. Jack Iverson mastered it, and bamboozled batsmen so much that when he played for Australia, the captain, also Iverson’s club captain, would move players from other clubs around in the field so they couldn’t watch Iverson up close. It is an account of the 1968 US Open semi-final between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, a profile of both men and their place in US society at the time. The beats of the player’s life are storyteller’s gold: shantytown upbringing, national team aged 17, FC Barcelona aged 22 (when he also had his first line of coke), World Cup winner aged 25, roaring into a camera at the World Cup, full of illegal stimulants, aged 33. More than once, the pressure of top-level football had come down hard. What follows is a staggering tale of will and courage that also addresses the perennial question of what drives people to climb mountains in the first place. His lid-lift on the jobbing cricketer’s lot is a celebration of shortfalls, on and off the pitch. David Simon, creator of The Wire, put Ball Four in his six all-time favourite books. Here are remembrances of picking through jeans on the bedroom floor to find the least-piss-soaked pair to wear. We all know football as a global obsession, but these fascinating tales – from the tragic to the bizarre – show just how far its reach extends. Ashe is black, Democrat, bookish, skinny; Graebner the opposite. Stewart Imlach played for Scotland at the 1958 World Cup and won the FA Cup with Nottingham Forest a year later. Hornby could not have imagined that his book would be relevant to the football fan’s experience 26 years after it was first published. According to The New York Times: "one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete." It’s a truly priceless privilege." Especially since this summer was supposed to be full of Olympics, of Liverpool's first title in three decades, of Lewis Hamilton's cementing his legacy as one of the greatest to ever sit in a Formula 1 cockpit. The Fight (1975) is Norman Mailer’s amazing retelling of the Rumble in the Jungle, and the giant, glossy Greatest of all Time (2003; 2010 reprint) by Taschen, is the coffee table book to top them all. And he had to do it all with boring, boring Arsenal. Adams was still a regular for Arsenal and England when his jaw-droppingly frank autobiography was published at the start of the 1998–99 season. Simpson's harrowing account of his and Simon Yates's calamitous assault, in 1985, on Siula Grande, Peru, has rightly transcended the sport of climbing and become a legendary fable for what humans are capable of doing to survive. "You won’t believe me, but it was right in that very moment," about to take the first penalty in the 2006 World Cup Final shoot-out, "I understood what a great thing it is to be Italian. Brian Clough (see elsewhere on this list) spent 44 days as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Out to get him is his American teammate Greg LeMond, who finished second to Hinault in the 1985 Tour and wants the result reversed in 1986’s race. He also observed, close-up, the press, fans and hooligans. Once read, never forgotten. Pirlo’s, however, has the sort of insight you’d expect from the thinking man’s Greatest Player of his Generation. He did. Hughes has neither of those. Instead: corruption, cocaine smuggling, car crashes and conspiracy to go with the calcio. In this slim volume, which punches far beyond its weight, McPhee plays it best of all. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1999) by David Remnick focuses on the Clay-becomes-Ali era of the early Sixties. Four books in particular stand out, together covering every angle you could wish for. It’s harder for fans to follow Hornby’s best piece of advice — be seen reading the papers’ back pages on the first days of a new job, to attract fellow supporters — but he absolutely nails the inexorable pull of football fandom. Fill the gaps between watching sport with the greatest writing about Muhammad Ali, Brian Clough, Diego Maradona and more By Paul Wilson and Will Hersey 21/04/2020 A gripping and always entertaining account of what can justifiably be called the cruellest sport of all, whatever your level. To millennial sportswriters who never leave the office (or sofa) to live blog sport on TV, Plimpton’s participatory journalism (“that ugly descriptive”, in his words) must seem preposterous and grand. Props to Agassi and his quest for truth, and also his ghost, JR Moehringer, who got 250 hours of interview time with his subject instead of the typical 30. Very funny stuff. And Muhammad Ali gets his own section, as Muhammad Ali should. It offended baseball so much, Bouton’s 1971 follow-up was called I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. Brilliant, evocative profiles of winning gamblers including Bobby Riggs (of the 1973 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match), pool legend Minnesota Fats and Tim Holland, backgammon’s best ever. Also: mafia, money, mayhem. His write-up of that time is spectacularly good. Greatest of All Time: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali, This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. “A spurious intimacy evolves between you,” writes Hamilton, of the relationship between a football club reporter and the club’s manager. In 2010, the book was retitled One Night in Turin, to tie in with the documentary of the same name. Squires has just completed his fourth season of football cartoons for The Guardian, with no sign of let-up in quality or hilarity. Reliving the latter contest, Moore forces the reader to pick sides — grizzled veteran versus young upstart, old ways versus new ways, USA versus France — which only heightens the drama. Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. Williams even-handedly dispels the myths surrounding the Brazilian’s remarkable life, his tragic death and the afterlife of his legend, yet maintains his heroic aura through concise, insightful analysis. Even if you're forced to take that holiday in your garden. As mid-life crises go, Barich’s, aged 35, is special. Says Agassi: "I knew in the book I had to expose everything." Equally extraordinary was the presence of McGinniss, a US writer famous for a revealing Richard Nixon book and true-crime doorsteps, as the upstarts’ Boswell. So: the unceasing slog, from toddler to champ, that prevented him from loving tennis, or anything, until he met his second wife Steffi Graf. This writers’ favourite began life, as most of its author’s books do, as an article in The New Yorker. Reading it now, Burn is not the Hunter S of the green baize: his write-up is as straight as Steve Davis’s cue action, yet all the better for it. English football’s second-finest hour — Italia ’90 — led to its finest book. Of his five books about taking part in pro-level match-ups in boxing, baseball, ice hockey, golf and US football, Paper Lion, on the latter, is the finest. As a study of football partisanship, one of the game’s most important emotions, it is astonishing. This biography, by the writer many think is cricket’s current best (they’re correct), reveals, at times movingly, why Iverson didn't become an all-timer. I Am Zlatan is held up as the foreign footballer’s must-read memoir, but entertaining though the Swede’s book is, time spent rubbing up against his ego isn’t so enlightening. It has room, too, for poets and wits, for sharp-eyed reporters and world-weary wise men, for gifted stylists with a keen sense of the way we lived then and the way we live now. His failed first marriage to Brooke Shields, crystal meth: it’s all here. Touché. Of course, Senna is beloved; even more so since the 2010 documentary biopic. Burn, known for his mixing of fiction with non-fiction in the New Journalism style, spent a year documenting snooker during its mid-Eighties’ boom, and produced one of the lesser-known classics of British sportswriting. Now you know about as much about Stewart as did his son Gary when the old man died. His first book, a history of the game with all-new work, is the funniest football tome since Viz’s Billy the Fish Football Yearbook, published 26 years earlier. (That it is still in print, after several bestselling years, would also be a surprise to him.) With unprecedented access to the stars – Greg Norman, Nick Price, John Daly and Nick Faldo to name just a few – and rookies alike, it reveals the disparate personalities and personal travails behind the TV images and how these combine with the particular demands of a sport where the margins between success and failure are so thin. Peace’s self-styled “fiction, based on a fact” unpacks this mistake via an unrelenting Clough inner monologue that brings the great man vividly to life. This book triumphantly redresses his oversight. But alone in a crevasse with a shattered leg, his situation is hopeless. Now try bowling a cricket ball held between thumb and middle finger. Last year’s second volume, The Illustrated History of Football: Hall of Fame, is more of the same. Lewis’s Moneyball, about disruptive baseball analysis, often appears on lists of this sort, but The Blind Side is more entertaining, with a you-couldn’t-make-it-up human-interest core that some felt was over-egged in the film version starring Sandra Bullock. Everything you’d think the 21st-century footballer is advised to leave out of an autobiog is here: infidelity, itemised career earnings, dialogue with the internal voice of crippling self-doubt (“you pathetic fucker, Cascarino!”), mystery injections from club physios and, most candidly, the fact you were not really qualified to play for your country. He sported Turnbull & Asser silk shirts and Gucci loafers, flashed gold lighters and a Piaget watch." Three years earlier, his two-year-old daughter died after lifelong heart problems. Jonathan Eig’s Ali: a Life (2017) is the best cradle-to-grave account, as good on the flaws as the fabulous. What we guarantee: at least one book that you’ve never read and can buy now in original paperback for holiday reading this summer. In his introduction to a later edition, writer Nik Cohn remembers Bradshaw’s "conscious roguery, a Rothmans perpetually dangling from one corner of his mouth, and that lopsided shark’s grin plastering the other. (Backgammon is not a sport.) As Churchill said: "When you're going through hell, keep going". And it's remarkably good; arguably the first and even best in the now-not-so-new wave of 'literary' football tomes that have followed in ever-greater numbers.
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