The 1972 Washington Redskins were dubbed the Over the Hill Gang by the media, who considered the team of aging veterans too old, too slow, and too ornery to succeed. The day-to-day story of how that team went to the Super Bowl is told in this book, which is the diary of Brig Owens, the team's safety and now a member of the Redskins Ring of Fame. It's all here--the competition, the battles for starting positions, coach George Allen's relentlessly thorough preparations, the humor, the tensio...

The ten stories in this collection have many scenes, actions, settings, conflicts, moments. Different characters create awakenings--sometimes without knowing it--for one another, for themselves, and for others.We all have those moments. It could be a word, a phrase, a look, an event, or just a thought that passes and then returns and then grows and then...we awaken! Many times, we do not realize the moments that made that impact until time has passed. And sometimes we do not see th...

When pro football players formed a union to stand up against the NFL for their own interests, they chose lawyer Ed Garvey as their Executive Director. The NFL Players Association (NFLPA), would take on the NFL over player contracts, collective bargaining agreements, and antitrust suits. It lobbied for players’ free agency, contract rights, and impartial arbitration of disciplinary disputes. Garvey navigated strikes, lockouts, scabs, stooges, lies, as well as the sports media complex—to mai...

**#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERFirst he rewrote the record book. Now, to mark the NHL's ninety-ninth anniversary, Wayne Gretzky has written the story of our game.**In 99: Stories of the Game, Gretzky looks back on the last ninety-nine years and tells us, from his point of view, about the NHL’s most memorable moments. We already know what he means to the game. Now he shows us what the game means to him.From hockey's fierce early battles on natural ice; through its ...

A behind-the-scenes tour of the ups and downs of an NFL season focuses on the Baltimore Ravens and reveals the lesser-known aspects of the professional league, from the dangerous conditions under which athletes are expected to train to the unrelenting pressures faced by coaches and players.In the NFL there is only one certainty: that every day, someone will have to be the Next Man Up. Football is an unrelentingly punishing sport, played and practiced at undiminishe...

A fresh, analytical, and entertaining take on hockey’s tough guysIn professional hockey, enforcers are often as popular with fans as the stars who cash the big paycheques. Called upon to duke it out with a fellow troublemaker, or to shadow (and bruise) an opponent’s top scorer, these men get the crowds out of their seats, the sports-radio shows buzzing, and the TV audience spilling their beers in excitement. Don’t Call Me Goon gives the mayhem-makers their...

In the spirit of Moneyball, the voice of the Toronto Blue Jays offers cutting insights on baseballBuck Martinez has been in and around professional baseball for nearly fifty years as a player, manager and broadcaster. Currently the play-by-play announcer for the Toronto Blue Jays, Martinez has witnessed enormous change in the game he loves, as it has morphed from a grassroots pastime to big business. Not all of the change has been for the better, and today...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed bestselling author comes a riveting journey through the world of minor-league baseball“Terrific…Reading this book will make you fall in love with baseball all over again.”—The Denver PostMinor league baseball is quintessentially American: small towns, small stadiums, $5 tickets, $2 hot dogs, the never-ending possibility of making it big. But looming above it all is always the real deal: Majo...

Jim Harrison grew up on the prairies, played Junior in Saskatchewan, and pro with the Bruins, Leafs, Hawks, and Oilers. Three years before a former teammate equaled the mark, Harrison set one of the most enduring and seemingly unreachable records in professional hockey with three goals and seven helpers on January 30, 1973. And almost nobody remembers.This is Harrison’s story: the games he played, the agent who stole from him, the woman he mourned, the fights he fought, and the friends he ...

The famed Sabres enforcer tells the story of fighting his way from small-town Canada to the NHL in a candid memoir that pulls no punches.Rob Ray was known as one of the NHL’s toughest players of the 1990s in the heyday of old-school hockey. During his thirteen seasons with the Buffalo Sabres, he twice led the league in time spent in the penalty box. He was especially known for his jersey-off fighting style—which eventually led to the “Rob Ray Rule” banning that pra...

The National Hockey League saw the birth of a new dynasty in 1980. The New York Islanders had been an expansion franchise in 1972 in the New York City suburbs of Long Island. For years they played in the long shadow of the big-city New York Rangers and were considered the league’s laughingstock during their first season. Miraculously, eight years later, they were champions. Despite their mercurial rise in the 1970s’-which included a first-place overall finish in the 1978-79 season’-the Isl...

In hockey, goalies have always been a contradiction — solitary men in a team game, the last line of defence and the stalwarts expected to save the day after any and every miscue and collapse from his teammates. It’s no wonder that anyone who played the position has had his sanity questioned; yet some of the biggest innovations in the game have come from its puckstoppers. In The Goaltenders’ Union, Greg Oliver and Richard Kamchen talk to more than 60 keepers of yesterday and today, finding ...