All Sports Books #1 of 2025

A Serbian 🏀 great and a history of modern French ⚽

Happy New Year. Welcome to the many new subscribers who signed up thanks to the Best of 2024 and Coming in 2025 lists. In this edition I share some thoughts on two recent releases that would have made my Best Of 2024 list had I read them in time!

🏀 Why So Serious? The Untold Story of NBA Champion Nikola Jokic by Mike Singer

A biography of a still active (and relatively young) player by a beat writer who regularly covers the player’s team is something that I usually avoid. The incentives lean heavily towards something self-serving that ensures relationship between star and biographer remains intact. This excellent biography of multiple MVP winning NBA star Nikola Jokic by longtime Denver Nuggets beat-writer Mike Singer has shown the more positive side of such books - Singer leveraged his unrivaled connections with the Nuggets and Jokic’s wider circle to tell the Jokic’s origin story in a readable, entertaining and honest way.

Jokic’s origin story is also a fascinating look at what it takes for potential to be fulfilled- the luck of finding the right people at the right time, the sacrifices needed by others to help, and the small moments that can shape someone’s path. Singer captures the importance of his early coaches, his brothers, and his teammates in helping Jokic reach the NBA - something that almost none of them would have believed likely in his early playing days.

Jokic emerges as a singular character whose superpower is his ability to combine a ferocious competitiveness and desire to win with a well-rounded life surrounded by family, friends and horses. Once he got to the NBA, his unique passing talent helped him reach MVP level but the bigger achievement may have been getting to the NBA in the first place. If Jokic has a darker side, we don’t see it here with teammates and peers gushing in their praise for Jokic as a man as much as a basketball player.

This is a really solid, readable work of biography that fills in the origins of a unique basketball talent and how both his personality and playing style were shaped by those around him and his homeland.

⚽Va-Va-Voom: The Modern History of French Football by Tom Williams

What comes to mind when you think of modern French football? For me it’s Zidane, Cantona, Henry’s handball, World Cups, players refusing to play, Marseille’s bribes and PSG’s general horribleness. Plenty of material for a book!

Williams has managed to shape this overwhelming volume of material into an absolutely brilliant book. The story is told across three broad narratives - the French clubs that shaped different periods of the domestic game, the French players and coaches who went abroad, and the national team’s highs and lows. The threads are woven together excellently with Williams capturing the influence different strands had on the others.

I particularly enjoyed the parts on French club football and the various teams that shaped French the domestic game before PSG’s current domination. There are definitely books to be written (or translated into English!) on Guy Roux’s Auxerre and the dominant Lyon teams of 2000 to 2008.

Through interviews with players, coaches and many of the leading figures of French football, Williams ultimately paints the picture of an ever-evolving football culture that has defied categorizations and resisted the idea of having one unified style of football. I had never considered French football in that way but it makes a lot of sense. With national team coach Didier Deschamps stepping down after the next World Cup, it will be fascinating to see how the next coach (presumably Zidane) uses this flexibility to shape the next iteration of Les Blues.

Classic sports book recommendation of the week

🏈Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football by Nicholas Dawidoff (2013). Dawidoff went behind the scenes for a full year in 2011 with Rex Ryan’s New York Jets. It’s a fantastic chronicle of behind-the-scenes in the NFL enlivened by Ryan’s larger than life character. Ryan interviewed for the Jets current vacancy this week and, in the unlikely event he gets the job again, I’d love nothing more than a sequel to this classic book.

Let me know what you are reading and any great sports books you find. Happy reading.