Placing Bets: Sports Books 2014

If books about sports were even half as popular as sports themselves, the bestseller lists would read like ESPN’s nightly lineup. But, of the 200 overall top-selling titles in 2013, as measured by Nielsen BookScan, not one focused on football, baseball, basketball, or any other of the sports that command millions of obsessive fans.

That hasn’t stemmed the seasonal flood of new sports titles out this fall and winter. Subjects range from the rise and fall of Oscar Pistorius, the double leg amputee Olympic sprinter who was recently convicted of culpable homicide in the shooting death of his girlfriend, to the widely celebrated 20-year run of newly retired New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter, who is launching a second career in publishing.

“The most successful sports books transcend sports and tell deeper stories,” says Chris Schluep, a former Random House editor who is now part of the book-recommending team at Amazon. As a recent example, he cites The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown, published by Viking in 2013. As of October 9, it was Amazon’s top-selling sports title (and #38 overall). Schluep calls it “a classic underdog tale” that appeals to readers who had no prior interest in Olympic rowing. It has sold more than 350K copies in hardcover and trade paper according to Nielsen BookScan, which covers about 85% of the print book market.

Other books, Schluep says, appeal to “super fans of a specific team, athlete, or coach. That’s usually a smaller box of readers.” But he also mentions three names—a football coach, a cartoonist, and a shortstop—who may hold interest for a wider audience.

After a career in New York, New England, and Dallas, former football coach Bill Parcells’s status as a “kind of guru—like Phil Jackson in basketball” should boost Parcells: A Football Life by Parcells and Nunyo Demasio (Crown Archetype, Oct.). The popularity of cartoonist Matthew Inman and his website, the Oatmeal, could bode well for his newly released The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances (Andrews McMeel), which has already sold almost 11K units in its first week out; Inman’s How to Tell if Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You has sold more than 275K units in paperback since its 2012 publication. And what amounted to a season-long Jeterfest has stirred interest in books by and about the former Yankees captain.

That’s good news for Simon & Schuster, which signed the shortstop as a partner in a new imprint, Jeter Publishing. Its first title, written by Jeter, with Paul Mantell, is the newly released The Contract, a middle-grade novel based on Jeter’s childhood that has moved 13,745 units in its first two weeks on sale, according to BookScan. His coffee-table photo album, Jeter Unfiltered, with photographs by Christopher Anderson, will be out in October. Other publishers are jumping on the Jeter bandwagon with commemorative titles, including Derek Jeter #2: Thanks for the Memories by David Fischer (Sports Publishing, Oct.) and the New York Times collection Derek Jeter: Excellence and Elegance, compiled and edited by Tyler Kepner (Triumph, Dec.).

The Big Picture

In the larger world of publishing, the sports category is not huge. Bowker’s most recent statistics show 5,807 sports titles released in 2013. That’s fewer than 2% of the 304,912 titles that were tracked. Computers, medicine, and poetry/drama—categories that generally get less media attention—each produced more books. Nielsen reports that an overwhelming majority of sports books are bought by men: 77%. In 2013, BookScan found that football replaced baseball as the most popular sports subject, followed by golf (in third place), basketball, and hockey.

George Gibson, publishing director of Bloomsbury USA, says that “when you look at the incredible popularity of sports in this country, you would think that sports books would sell like crazy.” The fact that most don’t, he says, “suggests that most hardcore sports fans are not book buyers. They may love to watch sports on TV, and call in to all those sports talk shows, but they are not rushing out to buy books.”

But Gibson sees opportunities in books that start with a core of readers, such as Bloomsbury’s Scribe: My Life in Sports (Oct.), a memoir by veteran Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan, who Gibson says is an “institution in New England” and, after frequent appearances on ESPN, has a national following.

Noting the media saturation of sports coverage, David Hirshey, an executive editor at HarperCollins and a former sportswriter, asks, “Who wants to buy a book when you can have instantaneous gratification from the talking heads on TV and radio, and the bloggers?”

The answer is found, he says, in “what we used to call literary nonfiction, the kind of storytelling and behind-the-scenes reporting you don’t get on TV or radio or from the bloggers.” He cites two HarperCollins titles. Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius by John Carlin is being rushed out in early December. Hirshey says he’s “not really concerned that by the time of publication, readers will know all about the verdict and sentencing, because the book puts not only Pistorius but post-Apartheid South Africa on trial.” The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them (Dec.) is a memoir by Tim Howard, the goaltender for the U.S. men’s national soccer team who made a record 16 saves in the side’s 2-1 extra-time loss to Belgium at the 2014 World Cup. “It’s more than a soccer book,” Hirshey says. “It’s the personal and professional story of a hyperactive kid from New Jersey with Tourette’s syndrome who defied the odds.” A young readers’ edition, The Keeper: The Unguarded Story of Tim Howard, will be released simultaneously.

Cathy Langer, the lead buyer at Denver’s Tattered Cover bookstores, sees interest in books that “don’t really glorify sports,” but rather “look at the deeply human side, the characters, or the dark underbelly.” Her examples: Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard by John Branch (Norton, Oct.), about the brutal career and fatal drug overdose of a hockey “enforcer,” or unofficial team brawler; and Indentured: The Epic Scandal of the NCAA by Joe Nocera (Portfolio, Mar. 2015), a critique of the business side of big-time college sports.

Stephen Bedford, marketing manager at Simon and Schuster, also appreciates books that treat sports as a serious business. “We as a society love sports, but is that love sometimes misplaced?” he asks. “Should we be watching them with skepticism because of their corporate practices?” He cautions, though, that such titles need to go beyond the investigative journalism in newspapers and magazines or on TV. “Doping scandals and the like belong as long-form journalism,” he says. “Nobody seems to be reading the book well after the fact.”

Susan Canavan, executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, says most football fans “have already heard a lot about what’s wrong with the sport—whether it’s the concussions or the Ray Rice case—but they still love football. They still love to watch it. That’s not to say that investigative stories and books are not important.” But, she asks, “Do readers really want to snuggle up with 350 pages about what’s wrong with the sport they love?”

By contrast, Rise: A Soldier, a Dream and a Promise Kept by David Rodriguez, with Joe Layden (Oct.), which Canavan edited, is about what can go right with sports. Rodriguez served in Iraq and Afghanistan and received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart—and returned home with PTSD. He transformed himself by playing college football. “It’s a feel-good story that offers a positive look at football,” Canavan says, “when there’s not much of that in the news.”

Former Sports Illustrated writer Lars Anderson, who now teaches journalism at the University of Alabama, says, “Life is bigger than sports, but sometimes sports seems bigger than life. Some of the best sports books use sports as a lens to see a bigger drama going on.” His newly released The Storm and the Tide: Tragedy, Hope and Triumph in Tuscaloosa (Sports Illustrated)—about a deadly 2011 tornado and the role the University of Alabama football team played in rebuilding the community—is shelved in bookstores’ sports sections, he says, “but it’s more about overcoming a tragedy and the resilience of the human spirit than it is about football.”

Putnam editor Neil Nyren acknowledges that because hockey is not as popular as football, basketball, or baseball in the United States, hockey books do best when they’re about the biggest stars. He says that Mr. Hockey: My Story (Oct.), a memoir by former Detroit Red Wings star Gordie Howe, should have that appeal, especially for older hockey fans. “I can see people saying, ‘My dad loved Gordie Howe. I’ll get him this book for Christmas.’ ”

The Long View

In 1972, veteran journalist Roger Kahn published The Boys of Summer, a love letter to the midcentury Brooklyn Dodgers. That book, which has sold in the neighborhood of three million copies, is considered a classic of the genre. Kahn, whose numerous other books include several about the Dodgers, returns once more to Ebbets Field for the newly published Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball (Rodale), expanding on the story of Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the breaking of Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

Other titles this season examine the often-fraught intersection of racial politics and athletics in the United States. Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South by Andrew Maraniss (Vanderbilt Univ., Dec.) profiles the first African-American basketball player to play in the NCAA’s Southeastern Conference, in 1967. And in The Secret Game: A Basketball Story in Black and White (Little, Brown, March 2015), Scott Ellsworth recounts how North Carolina College for Negroes played an all-white military team from Duke University’s medical school in 1944, at a time when such racially mixed play was illegal.

Whatever the subject, says Adam Rifenberick, an independent publicist who specializes in sports titles, a successful book needs to be “readily accepted as a critical work by both the literary side of the business” and the sports magazines and online writers. “Although sports is popular, the genre doesn’t support fools or half-baked headline grabbers,” he notes. “Like all of publishing, the title has to fill a gap in the greater narrative. And it’s got to deliver.”

Bob Minzesheimer is a freelance writer and reviewer whose original ambition was to play second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Below, more on the subject of sports books.

Brooklyn indie publisher Akashic Books is partnering with David Zirin, the Nation’s sports correspondent, to launch Edge of Sports Books, an imprint devoted to sports titles with a progressive political slant.