In America, fall ’tis the season for sports—baseball playoffs and the World Series, weekends packed with college football and the NFL, hockey getting under way, and basketball, too, if labor issues are worked out. The intensity keeps up till February, when your average fan takes a break till the NCAA basketball tournament and the return of baseball. Publishing-wise, of course, the gift-giving season, roughly Thanksgiving through Christmas, makes this all an opportunity for publishers and booksellers to offer ideal items for the millions of sports-crazy citizens. And this season has a stocked lineup.
Good Reads
David Hirshey, executive editor at HarperCollins, had a big hit last fall with Jane Leavy’s The Last Boy, her biography of the haunted Mickey Mantle. This fall, the book appears in paperback, backed by a media tour as large or larger than what Harper mounted for the hardcover. But Hirshey has a new entry with a good chance to surprise (and charm) readers who might think they know what The Whore of Akron, Scott Raab’s chronicle of two years following LeBron James, is about. At first glance, one expects a diatribe from an embittered Cleveland native against the prodigal son who abandoned the rust-belt town and its faithful. But Raab instead has produced, according to Hirshey, “a consideration of life and death and the meaning of fanhood,” a book that Buzz Bissinger has called “funny, heartfelt, and wincingly honest,” and which has been compared to Frederick Exley’s classic A Fan’s Notes.
Twelve—perhaps trade publishing’s most careful and selective imprint— also has a surprise title. And it’s not a current events title or a biography or belles lettres, Twelve’s usual staples, but about a book about auto racing. Specifically, Michael Cannell’s The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit—an epic battle between American Phil Hill, a former mechanic, and a German count, Wolfgang von Trips. The book has drawn comparisons to a title about another great racing machine—Seabiscuit.
For basketball fans, The Shaq Show continues despite his retirement from the game last year. Shaq Uncut by Shaquille O’Neal with Jackie MacMullen comes from Grand Central. Given Shaq’s reputation as a great jokester as well as straight-shooter (except from the free-throw line), fans looking for insight and entertainment about life in the spotlight need look no further.
For basketball fans of a certain age, the clutch and steely play of Jerry West, the great L.A. Laker, remains an indelible memory. In West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life, West, who went on to become one of the great front-office executives of the game, details the high price of perfectionism, on and off the court. Little, Brown publishes this month.
For basketball fans whose sorry lot it is to also be Knicks fans, Harvey Araton, longtime sports columnist for the New York Times, scrolls back to paradise in When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks, from HarperCollins. It might help some fans forget the Dolan era.
Great sports books are often centered on off-beat figures or topics, like an Oakland general manager (Moneyball); a short, awkward horse (the aforementioned Seabiscuit); a diary from a pitcher on a bad team (Ball Four). Out this month from Taylor Trade is Super Bowl Monday, in which Adam Lazarus, a veteran sportswriter, returns us to the 1991 Super Bowl between the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills, but brings us also to the Persian Gulf, where, 10 days before the game, American troops had been deployed.
Although stories of triumph often dominate sports book publishing, there sometime comes a book about failure, and the entry from small Crimson Oak Publishing is, in its way, audacious: 596 Switch: The Improbable Journey from the Palouse to Pasadena is by Ryan Leaf, known by all pro football fans as a kind of poster boy of flameout. Leaf, the second pick in the 1998 draft (behind Peyton Manning), played poorly, behaved boorishly, blamed others, and was out of the game in four years. But apparently, he has rebuilt his life, and his character, and 596 Switch (the title refers to his last intended play call at the Rose Bowl before time ran out) tells of his sparkling college career at Washington State, which culminated in a tough loss to Michigan in Pasadena. Crimson Oak will follow with a second book by Leaf next spring, titled Third and Long, in which Leaf will reportedly take himself to task for his failures as a football player and a man. A third volume will follow. A confessional about personal failure and dealing with widespread scorn might not be for everyone, but someone might think to send LeBron a copy.
Illustrated Books
There is an inherent aesthetic beauty to sports—the playing fields, the broad expanses, the often balletic efforts captured in memory or in photographs. And then there are the often magnificent designs of the tools of a sport, or of the prizes—the cups, belts, trophies, or simply the great faces etched by the trials of competition. This fall there are several standout titles that show sport to its best advantage.
Leading the way, from the great art book publisher Harry Abrams, are two titles by the legendary photographer Charles M. Conlon, who took more than 30,000 photographs during his four decades of work, from 1904 till World War II. It was Conlon who took the famous photo in 1909 of Ty Cobb sliding into third base and upending an infielder in a spray of dirt, a satisfied leer on Cobb’s face. In The Big Show: Charles Conlon’s Golden Age of Baseball, to which Roger Kahn has contributed an eloquent foreword, the editors Neal and Constance McCabe have included a generous cross-section of Conlon’s portraiture, where famous ballplayers mix with those who are long forgotten, which in itself gives viewers an authentic feel for a lost age. The second book, Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon, is a reissue of the 1997 edition but with a new foreword by New Yorker writer Roger Angell. As in the first volume, the McCabes add fascinating text and anecdotes, which give the presentation a satisfying historical heft. Both volumes are priced at $35.
Thunder Bay Press focuses on the historic—and many vanished—ballparks, bowls, and stadia in which baseball has been played over the past 150 years, in 500 Ballparks by Eric Pastore ($29.95). The handsome book, due in November, features 500 photos and 250 line drawings. Fans can see the evolution of many things—America, the game itself, and the nature of public events—by flipping from illustrations of roped-off fields of the 19th century with pastureland in the outfield to today’s steel and masonry behemoths and the now current retro parks.
For fans of pro football, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has a winner in 100 Yards of Glory by Joe Garner and NBC broadcaster Bob Costas, with a foreword by Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana. What makes this book special are the beautiful photographs of iconic moments in NFL history, plus an original, 10-part documentary on DVD. The publisher states that this title will also be available as an enhanced DVD, so gentlemen, start your Fires and iPads.
Golf enthusiasts are known to be a great market for books about their game. Given the championship play of late by golfers from Great Britain and Ireland—Rory McIlroy, Padraig Harrington, and Darren Clarke—Golf Courses: Great Britain and Ireland by David Cannon might well be a must-have. Published by Rizzoli in typical visual splendor, the $195 hardcover showcases the stunning views of the great links courses that distinguish golf on those islands in the North Atlantic. The book includes gatefolds that measure more than five feet—still, a makable putt. Cannon is an official photographer for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.
Hockey is a sport that, though not part of the big three sports in North America, has retained a strong fan base, in Canada, of course, but in several large America cities—most certainly in all those cities that have hosted NHL teams since the league’s inception. In Hockey’s Original Six: Great Players of the Golden Era, the game’s North American founding teams and its iconic players are given their due. Written by hockey archivist Mike Leonetti and pioneering Toronto Star photographer Charles Barkley, the book brings the old game—before face masks and helmets—back to life. Greystone Books, an imprint of the Toronto-based Douglas & McIntyre, will publish later this month ($40).
Firefly, another Canadian house, teams up with the Hockey Hall of Fame to handsomely present many of the artifacts of the game in Hockey Hall of Fame Treasures. To diehard fans, this will be a visual skate around among the talismans of hockey’s greatest moments, players, and contests. It publishes in November ($39.95).
Biking of course is a sport—and bikes themselves are a part of cultures everywhere. Chronicle Books’ Cyclepedia: A Century of Iconic Bicycle Design celebrates the best of bicycle design—whether high-tech hybrids or eccentric models (a bike designed for ice?) or just the very rare. The book is written by two well-known bicycle designers, Michael Embacher and Paul Smith, and priced at $35, out this month.
