Category:Sports Literature
From Eurêka
Sports Literature
Note Based on Observer and Borders UK search for the best 50 sports books of all time in January 2006, most of the selections were drawn from the UK, with the rest largely from the US. As a result, cricket and soccer are the most common, though boxing is well represented. List is based on originality of subject and new insight into a sport, as well as literary style. There are only five works of fiction on the list.
“A Fan's Notes” (1968) By Frederick Exley, part fictionalised memoir, part hymn to drink, part celebration of the joys of following sport, makes explicit the link between drinking and watching sport.
American Football Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“Friday Night Lights” (1990) By HG Bissinger, American football high-school team in Texas.
“Paper Lion” (1966) By George Plimpton, American football and the NFL team the Detroit Lions in 1963.
Baseball Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“The Boys of Summer” (1972) By Roger Kahn, baseball and Brooklyn Dodgers and racism with Jackie Robinson in the 1950s. “Kahn's account of the Dodgers' voyages through the Deep South, in the 1950s, still shock.” Title borrowed from a Dylan Thomas poem about the transience of youthful glory.
“Eight Men Out” (1963) By Eliot Asinof, Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to throw the 1919 World Series is often cited as one of the moments when 20th-century America lost its innocence, the most shocking scandal in American sport. The book was made into a film in 1988.
“Underworld” (1997) By Don DeLillo, 900-page novel begins with one of the most celebrated moments in baseball: Bobby Thomson's winning strike, the 'shot heard round the world', that gave the New York Giants the 1951 National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers, that becomes an extended metaphor for the disturbed and complicated postwar history of America itself.
Basketball Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“A Season on the Brink” (1986) By John Feinstein, college basketball team, the Indiana Hoosiers, 1985-86.
Boxing Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“The Fight” (1975) By Norman Mailer, a thrilling account of the 1974 world heavyweight boxing championship in Kinshasa.
“The Sweet Science” (1956) By AJ Liebling, boxing on New York’s waterfront 1951-1955.
“King of the World” (1999) By David Remnick, boxing, America and race in 1960s.
“Muhammad Ali” (1991) By Thomas Hauser, boxing.
“McIlvanney on Boxing” (1982) By Hugh McIlvanney, boxing.
“Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King” (1995) By Jack Newfield, boxing in which author “uncovers all the sordid details of King's convictions for homicide and larceny, as well as the combination of bravado, bullshit and bullying that propelled him to the top of boxing's greasy pole.”
“Dark Trade” (1996) By Donald McRae, boxing and its nature that makes it a vile sport.
Climbing Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“Touching the Void” (1998) By Joe Simpson, climbing, one of the best adventure stories ever told.
“Mountains of the Mind” (2003) By Robert Macfarlane, climbing focusing on the cultural appeal of mountain landscapes.
Cricket Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“Beyond a Boundary” (1963) By CLR James who traces the fruition of national West Indian consciousness through the development of cricket.
“The Art of Captaincy” (1985) By Mike Brearley, cricket.
“A Lot of Hard Yakka” (1997) By Simon Hughes, county cricket.
“Anyone but England: Cricket and the National Malaise” (1994) By Mike Marqusee, cricket shows how race and class have influenced the English game. He argues the case that the English cricket establishment sold its soul to big business having for so long dismissed the aspirations of professional players, and that it resisted the rise of black and Asian cricket (both in England and internationally) while offering the hand of friendship to their white brethren in apartheid-era South Africa.
“Basil D'Oliveira” (2004) By Peter Oborne, cricket and racism.
“Harold Gimblett, tormented genius of cricket” (1982) By David Foot, cricket, the story of Somerset player, Bicknoller Biffer, who was also a manic depressive who would be admitted to a psychiatric unit for electro-convulsant therapy and committed suicide in 1978 at the age of 63. Foot's biography contrasts the merry confidence of his batting with the insecure introspection that consumed him beyond the boundary.
“Close of Play” (1956) By Neville Cardus (1899-?), who in cricket found the humour of England’s national and regional character. Players' performances were to him bound up in the hopes and frustrations of the crowds they played for.
Cycling Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“It's not About the Bike” (2000) By Lance Armstrong, cycling and Tour de France and the struggle with cancer.
“Rough Ride” (1990) By Paul Kimmage, cycling, the first book by a professional cyclist to confront the drugs issue blighting the sport.
Golf Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“The Golf Omnibus” (1973) By PG Wodehouse, golf.
“Train” (2003) By Pete Dexter, novel about golf and racism.
Horse Racing Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“Seabiscuit” (2001) by Laura Hillenbrand, a race horse story.
Rugby Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“This Sporting Life” (1960) By David Storey, rugby league novel. Lindsay Anderson made it into a film, with Richard Harris in the lead.
“Endless Winter” (1993) By Stephen Jones, 1992-93 rugby season was bookended by the return of the Springboks to the international fold and the Lions tour to New Zealand. In between fell a Five Nations tournament in which all the teams posed a genuine threat to one another.
Soccer Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“Fever Pitch” (1992) By Nick Hornby soccer.
“Addicted” (1998) By Tony Adams with Ian Ridley, soccer and alcoholism.
“The Glory Game” (1972) by Hunter Davies, soccer and Tottenham 1970s.
“Only a Game” (1976) By Eamon Dunphy, soccer, the first critical insight into the existence of the soccer pro struggling for a living in the lower divisions, Millwall 1973-74.
“How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup” (1975) By JL Carr, soccer novel, “a dazzling version of the time-honoured fantasy in which a village side goes on an unfettered rampage of giant-killing.... Like everything else Carr wrote it is, at heart, a deeply serious book about a vanishing world and the communities that sustained it, a kind of bitter-sweet skit on the realities of a provincial life mouldering away in damp and wind-blown silence.”
“All Played Out” (1991) By Pete Davies, soccer following Bobby Robson's team on their way to a World Cup semi-final at Italia 90.
“The Miracle of Castel di Sangro” (1999) By Joe McGinniss, soccer, a local team in Italy, 1996-97.
“Football Against the Enemy” (1994) By Simon Kuper, soccer as the medium through which the world's hopes and fears are truly expressed.
“The Football Man” (1968) By Arthur Hopcraft, soccer after England's World Cup victory, the first attempt to place the national game in a social and cultural as well as sporting context.
“Brilliant Orange” (2000) By David Winner, the emergence of total football, unique to Holland, becomes inextricably linked to the Dutch national character and its concern with space, expression and artistry.
“A Season in Verona” (2003) By Tim Parks, soccer, about Hellas Verona's battle to stay in Serie A during the 2000-01 season (they avoided relegation by one point) is used to support his contention that football is a reflection of the Italian national condition.
“Football Grounds of England and Wales” (1983) By Simon Inglis, soccer, an audit of grounds at a time when, much like the football, they were at their ramshackle worst, yet found much to treasure. While doing so, he also captured the football and social history unique to each.
“The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino” (2000) By Tony Cascarino with Paul Kimmage, soccer, a Millwall striker who played for the Republic of Ireland.
“The Far Corner” (1995) By Harry Pearson, soccer, the north-east’s a unique place in English football.
Tennis Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“Winning Ugly” (1993) By Brad Gilbert, tennis.
Water Sports Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“True Blue” (1989) By Dan Topolski, the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, when the mutiny of five Americans who walked out of the 1987 Oxford crew when Topolski was the head coach days before the boat race leaving him to field a scratched together team which won the race. Made into a film.
“Walking on Water” (1991) By Andy Martin, surfing.
Other Sports Literature
(descending order of excellence)
“The Master of Go” (1951) By Yasunari Kawabata about Go that is not simply a game, but at its best, and especially as played by the Master, it is an expression of an aristocratic sensibility, an art, with a certain Oriental nobility and mystery: “the conservative Master, believed to be invincible, is portrayed here as the embodiment of an older, more ritualised Japan that is threatened by the forces of modernity.”
Note: Kawabata who, in 1968, became the first Japanese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an elegist. He committed suicide in 1972.
“Little Girls in Pretty Boxes” (1996) By Joan Ryan, an attack on the politics of gymnastics and ice skating.
“On Bullfighting” (2000) By Al Kennedy, bullfighting, reflecting Spain's most celebrated dance with death, using the sport's ancient rituals of Corrida - the dance between beast and man.
