From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way."Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington PostNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant...

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way."Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington PostNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant...

From the hot writer everybody’s talking about — the author of the sensational Havana Best Friends.Elliot Steill, the product of a brief union between his Cuban mother and an American-born labourer, is an unhappy teacher in Havana when a man claiming to be a friend of Steill’s deceased father arrives in Cuba and offers him the chance to escape. The plan goes dangerously amiss, and Steill is soon on the hunt through Miami’s mean streets for the man who betrayed him. ...

For more than eighty years, The New Yorker has been home to some of the toughest, wisest, funniest, and most moving sportswriting around. The Only Game in Town is a classic collection from a magazine with a deep bench, including such authors as Roger Angell, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and John McPhee. Hall of Famer Ring Lardner is here, bemoaning the lowering of standards for baseball achievement—in 1930. John Cheever pens a story about a boy’s troubled relationship with h...

The most popular sports columnist in America puts his life (and dignity) on the line in search of the most absurd sporting event on the planet.What is the stupidest sport in the world? Not content to pontificate from the sidelines, Rick Reilly set out on a global journey—with stops in Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Denmark, England, and even a maximum security prison at Angola, Louisiana—to discover the answer to this enduring question.From the physically...

In this eBook exclusive essay, Pulitzer Prize–winning sports journalist George Dohrmann follows a father and son separated by prison bars—but bonded by their pursuit of basketball glory.The dream of playing big-time basketball never came true for Bruce Nelson, so he passed it on to his son Roberto. His every waking moment as a father was devoted to securing Roberto a Division I scholarship. Oftentimes he worried that his son’s lack of competitive fire might put tha...

TAKE THEM OUT OF THE BALL GAME–PLEASE!From star running back Bryon “Bam” Morris’s interesting (and totally illegal) sideline career to the 1950s Kansas City A’s sneaky relationship with the New York Yankees; from French golfer Jean Van de Velde’s epic choke on 18 at the 1999 British Open to the infamous Cleveland Ten-Cent Beer Night riot of 1974; from Hungary’s bloody 1956 Olympic water polo match with the Soviet Union to the definitive analysis of basketball coach Larry Brown’s sa...

Painstakingly faithful to its title, Kenny Mayne’s book is neither complete nor is it particularly accurate. Ostensibly an A-to-Z encyclopedia of all known sports, many sports are never mentioned. There’s not a word about rugby, volleyball, Roller Derby, swimming, or (shockingly) Basque pelota or shinty. There is a chapter about sliding, but none about skiing. Competitive eating and rhythmic gymnastics will have to wait for another book. However, there are roughly eight chapters about tack...

An irreverent testament to the millions of anglers who ever hooked something they oughta notta, lost a really big one, or told a whopperFishing is the No. 1 sport for fun—and spectacular snafus. Whether it’s a pro like Ray Scott or a presidential angler like George Bush, the deck is stacked to make buffoons of the best. So cast off on an ocean of hooks, lines, and stinkers as fishing guides, charter boat captains, game wardens, and weekend fishermen spill the wacky...

College football is a sport of rivalries—and no two teams were ever more perfectly matched than the Miami Hurricanes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. In Perfect Rivals, award-winning sportswriter Jeff Carroll takes us inside the locker rooms and onto the gridiron, as two storied programs with very different cultures battle for national supremacy, school pride, and the soul of the game itself.Beginning with the Hurricanes’ nationally televised 58–7 pasting of the Irish at the Oran...

'A must-have' - The Telegraph'Book of the Week' - The Independent'Hilarious' - Sport MagazineFrom the host of the Football Clichés podcast comes the hilarious and ever-relevant debut book.In what other context do football fans use the words 'aplomb' or 'derisory'? Why don't we use 'rifle' as a verb on the other six days of the week? Why do aggrieved midfielders feel the instinctive need to m...

THE ESSENTIAL BOOK FOR ANY SPORTS FAN, FROM ONE OF THE REIGNING KINGS OF SPORTS TALK RADIO, CHRISTOPHER “MAD DOG” RUSSOWhich was the greater achievement, Ted Williams’s .406 season or Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak?Who’d be left standing in a battle between Joe Louis and Mohammed Ali?Which NBA team was the greatest of all time—the ’66–’67 Celtics? The ’71–’72 Lakers? What about the ’95–’96 Bulls?Who would dominate the ultimate Pebble Beach showdown—Be...