Sports Essays

In the last two decades, innovation, data analysis, and technology have driven a tectonic shift in the sports business. Game of Edges is the story of how sports franchises evolved, on and off the field, from raggedly run small businesses into some of the most systematically productive companies around.

In Drama in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali's last bout. Through interviews with many of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks short of his 40th birthday, a seriously diminished Ali stepped through the ropes one more time to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick.

New York Times best-selling author and acclaimed Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is known for such groundbreaking works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A provocative collection of rants and reflections from Thompson’s columns at ESPN.com, Hey Rube offers outrageously brilliant insight on topics ranging from the 2000 election to his unconventional take on professional sports (“eliminate the pitcher” to improve Major League Baseball).

A sweeping and revelatory history of basketball, drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews with the greatest players, coaches, executives, and journalists in the history of the game. In an effort to tell the complete story of basketball in all its fascinating dimensions, acclaimed authors Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew, and Dan Klores have compiled nearly a thousand hours' worth of interviews with a staggering number of basketball greats. The audiobook that grew out of those interviews is an extraordinary project and quite possibly the most ambitious basketball work ever made.

For those who dare, things often go wrong on the sea. Deep Blue offers some of literature's greatest stories about the ocean and the people who risk its wrath. Castaways, pirates, and victims of shipwreck all fight to survive in far-flung places and under harrowing circumstances. Together, these works offer a convincing reminder of the sea's dangers and mysteries.

Originally published in 1994, this book was a fly-fishing phenomenon in the way Howell Raines' Fly Fishing Through the Mid-Life Crisis was. Taking his fishing hobby to near metaphysical levels, Ted Leeson tells about his passions: rivers, trout, and fly fishing. With wry humor and rare insight, he explores questions that engage most fishermen: What is it about rivers that draws us so irresistibly, and why does fly fishing seem such an aptly suited response?

In Boston Celtics: Where Have You Gone? fans can catch up with their favorite players from past and present.

What’s it like to race across the blacktop of the nation’s most famous track? How does it feel to smash into a concrete wall while going over 200 miles per hour? This exciting, humorous, and poignant collection of tales takes listeners inside the most exciting race in America. Tales from the Indianapolis 500 captures horrific collisions and sweet victories from drivers past and present.

From French rugby's origins in Le Havre, (as an English export in the late nineteenth century), to the Catalan coast, acclaimed rugby writer Peter Bills travels the length and breadth of this vast country, visiting not only the big cities but those regional heartlands of the game such as Toulouse, Bordeaux and Clermont, as well as clubs in the Basque country, to reveal a country whose deep love of rugby has created a culture and playing style like no other.

For Mike Krzyzewski, head coach of the Duke University men's basketball team, certain words have special importance and force. Coach K uses them every day to energize, motivate, and teach his players how to be winners on the court and in every aspect of their lives. Now, in Beyond Basketball, he offers 40 short, hard-hitting audio essays that will educate and inspire. Each is centered on an important keyword and illustrated with anecdotes from his personal experiences.

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death - with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, time, and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they're likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that.

Baseball has been defaced and consumed by corporate America. As Moneyball-thinking and Ivy League graduates grabbed hold of the sport, the Astros set out to build a cost-efficient winning machine on the principles of the outside business world, squeezing every dollar out of every transaction, player and employee. In less than a decade, Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow helped revolutionize the game and create an environment that led to one of the worst cheating scandals in baseball history, a Shakespearean tragedy of innovation and failed change management.

"Epic" is a mountaineering term that evokes a sense of treacherous disaster. The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water, and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. This program offers a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world's most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions.

This collection of 20 essays and articles on mountaineering and adventure by David Roberts, selected from the published works of two decades, showcases one of the most highly regarded writers in the field. The articles are composed of three types: Adventures (Roberts' own climbs and outings), Profiles (other adventurers), and Reflections (meditative essays about the meaning of the whole business). Roberts ranges the globe (Africa, Alaska, New Guinea) and introduces unique personalities (Reinhold Messner, John Roskelly, Don Sheldon).

Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America. Easy to learn, but impossible to master, it’s no wonder that nearly 5 million people nationwide have picked up their paddles and taken to the court. But people aren’t just dabbling in this up-and-coming activity, they are obsessed; some hit the court as many as five, six, even seven times a week. As Vanity Fair put it, pickleball has “won over everyone, from Leonardo DiCaprio to your grandparents.”

ESPN personality ( Get Up and #Greeny) and New York Times bestselling author Mike Greenberg partners with mega-producer Hembo to settle once and for all which legends flat-out own which numbers. In short essays certain to provoke debate between and amongst all generations, Greeny uses his lifetime of sports knowledge to spin yarns of the legends among the legends and tell you why some have claimed their spot in the top 100 of all time.

Stan Fischler, the dean of American hockey journalists and best-selling author of more than 60 books on hockey, profiles the heroes of Hockeytown in Detroit Red Wings: Greatest Moments and Players. One of the National Hockey League's "Original Six", few teams in professional hockey have enjoyed more success than the franchise in Detroit. Among the players Fischler glorifies are the immortal Gordie Howe, Terry Sawchuk, Ted Lindsay, Alex Delvecchio, and Sid Abel, all players whose numbers reside on banners in the rafters of Joe Louis Arena.

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. Upon Further Review takes classic arguments conducted over pints in a pub and places them in the hands of writers, athletes, and historians. From turning points that every sports fan rues or celebrates to the forgotten would-be inflection points that defined sports, it answers age-old questions, and settles the score, even if the score bounced off the crossbar.

Jalen Rose has never been quiet. Not as a kid growing up in Detroit in the '70s and '80s. Not as the brash, trash-talking leader of the legendary "Fab Five" at the University of Michigan. Not as the player under the stewardship of Hall of Famers Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and others throughout his 13-year NBA career. And certainly not as a commentator and analyst on ABC/ESPN and Grantland.

In This Book Has Balls, Rapaport uses his signature smack-talk style and in-your-face humor to discuss everything from why LeBron will never be like Mike to how Tiger needs the ladies to get his golf game back and how he once thought Mary Lou Retton was his true love. And, of course, why next year will be the year the New York Knicks win the championship. This book is a series of rants - some controversial, some affectionate, but all incredibly hilarious.