The Sports Books That Sportswriters Love
200+ writers told me which sports books they really love
When I first made and shared this list two years ago, I had 250 subscribers to the newsletter. To celebrate reaching 1,000 subscribers I’m resharing it today. The List of Sports Books That Sportswriters Love has continued to grow as I add more and more of the books recommended to me by sportswriters and authors.
If you want to jump straight into the list it’s available here - The List
What books do you really love? I ask this question of almost anybody I meet as soon as I know they are a reader.
For me, lists of ‘best’ books always frame the question wrong. These lists are subjective and attempts at objective lack credibility, so lets frame this list as a purely subjective one - what books do you really love?
I’ve long wanted to put together a list of great sports books but even I can’t read them all! So, I decided to ask as many sports writers as I could a variation of the same question I ask most people - what sports books do you really love? I’ve been lucky enough to interact with dozens of authors during my time on twitter so I figured I could get at least 30 or 40 answers. Wonderfully, over 150 writers of different types (authors, journalists, academics, bloggers), responded but to my twitter thread and to my direct messages.
The result is a list of over 300 sports books recommended and loved by a wide variety of sports writers. Below I give my own thoughts on the list including which writers were most often chosen and which books were the most picked for each sport. At the end, I also note some the biases inherent in the list based on who I am, and the profile of those who responded to me. The list will be a living document which is continuously added to as I ask any writer I interact with to tell me (and therefore the list) what sports book they really love.
If you want to jump straight into the list it’s available here - The List
If you want to see which author’s chose which books, and what they said about them, that is set out in detail at The List - Writers’ Choices.
Pease share the list or this newsletter with friends or on social media if you enjoyed them or find them useful for tracking down some great books.
I’ll be back next week with some thoughts on the plans for the All Sports Books Newsletter in 2023 and more reviews of great sports books. Happy New Year and, as always, Happy Reading!
🐐 The Greatest Of All Time - David Halberstam
Compiling the list, one writer appeared again and again for multiple different books covering different sports. David Halberstam, who was more famous for his war reporting than his sports books, was the most picked writer by a considerable distance. The Breaks of the Game, his epic 1981 book covering the Portland Trail Blazers' NBA team for the 1979–1980 season was (unsurprisingly) the most picked basketball book. It’s a masterpiece that captures the sport and America at a time of change and upheaval.
While a bunch of excellent writers had multiple books chosen for the list (Jeff Pearlman, Donald McRae, John Feinstein, Paul Kimmage, Simon Kuper, Duncan Hamilton, Dave Zirin, amongst others), Halberstam had 5 books chosen together with multiple other respondents simply saying ‘Everything by Halberstam’ reflecting the quality of his books which also cover baseball, rowing and American Football.
🏈American Football
Two American football books were the clear favourite choices:
When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss, and
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by Buzz Bissinger
These two classics are very well known and need little recommendation from me so I want to highlight a few other choices worth checking out. Across the River: Life, Death and Football in an American City by Kent Babb was picked multiple times - and is one of my all time favourite books. It's the story of a remarkable high school football coach in New Orleans and the reality of life for young black kids in urban America. The book captures both the worst of society and the best of humanity. Its about sport as a vehicle for growth, about mentoring and being there. It’s an excellent, important, powerful, heart-breaking, and life-affirming book.
Another choice I want to highlight is Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton by Jeff Pearlman. Jeff has written in the past about how difficult he found the negative reaction to Sweetness, especially from teammates and family of Payton who never even read the book. I’m glad some others appreciate it as much as I do - it’s an excellent work of biography.
Of those on the list that I haven’t read, I’m intrigued to check out About Three Bricks Shy of a Load: A Highly Irregular Lowdown on the Year the Pittsburgh Steelers Were Super but Missed the Bowl by Roy Blount which was described as the funniest book about sports you could read.
You can see all 28 American football books that made the list by checking out the full list at The List or The List - Writers’ Choices.
⚾ Baseball
Maybe only boxing has as proud a tradition of literature and great books as baseball. Forty nine different baseball books were recommended but one stood out with more recommendations that any other - The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. Those that picked Kahn’s book most often described it as their all time favourite and as the most influential sports book of all time. It was also popular with a very diverse range of writers - most of whom don’t write about baseball.
Other popular baseball classics picked include Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer, A False Spring by Pat Jordan and Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy. David Halberstam’s baseball books were also popular choices, especially the exceptional Teammates.
Of recent choices, my own recommendation is for Playing Through the Pain by Dan Good, a bio of Ken Caminiti’s life and career. It’s a wonderful, heart-breaking, compelling, fantastic book.
Of those I haven’t read, I’m most excited to check out Where They Ain't: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team that Gave Birth to Modern Baseball by Burt Solomon.
You can see all 49 baseball books that made the list by checking out the full list at The List or The List - Writers’ Choices.
⚽ Football
Possibly reflecting that a lot of my followers are from Britain and Ireland, or the global growth of the game, the list contains a whopping 75 football books. There was also no one clearly most popular book with 10 different books getting five or more recommendations. The most popular ones were:
All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia '90 by Pete Davies
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy by Joe McGinnis
Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football by David Winner
Football Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football by David Goldblatt
Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough by Duncan Hamilton
The Glory Game by Hunter Davies
Thirty-One Nil: On the Road with Football's Outsiders: A World Cup Odyssey by James Montague
All Played Out and The Miracle of Castel di Sangro were picked more than any book in any sport. Those who picked All Played Out, a behind the scenes account of England’s Italia ‘90 World Cup campaign, were effusive in their praise and adamant that it’s the best book ever about the sport. I also loved The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, which recounts the author’s journey following the 1996/97 Serie B campaign of tiny Castel Di Sangro after they had achieved an unexpected promotion (the ‘Miracle’) to the second division in Italian football.
In terms of most influential books, a number of writers citied the huge influence that Football Against the Enemy had on their own careers. Personally, it opened my eyes to sport as sociology, politics and history. It is one of the books I really love, I will never forget the feeling of discovery it gave me and I have really enjoyed reading so many of the books it clearly inspired over the years. Fever Pitch, the hugely iconic account of Hornby’s Arsenal fandom was also described by more than one writer as ‘the most important book I’ve ever read’.
Of recent books, I’d personally recommend The Rodfather: Inside the Beautiful (Ugly, Ridiculous, Hilarious) Game by Roddy Collins with Paul Howard. It's a memoir about Collins’ life as a player and manager in Irish football and the English lower leagues. Its a fascinating look at life at the lower end of football both on and off the pitch while it also works as a social history of working class Dublin and the ways in which Irish life has evolved over the years. It's a joy to read and the funniest and most entertaining book I've read in a long time.
You can see all 75 football books that made the list by checking out the full list at The List or The List - Writers’ Choices.
🏀 Basketball
As mentioned earlier, The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam, was the most picked basketball book on the list. The other most picked book was the excellent Loose Balls: The Short Wild Life of the American Basketball Association by Terry Pluto, an oral history of the ABA and the impact it ultimately had on the NBA. It’s a wild ride of crazy characters, marketing stunts and, importantly, some very good basketball players. The business side of the story is also fascinating as teams scrambled to survive and to try and pressure the NBA into a merger.
Other popular choices included two books by John Feinstein - The Punch about the infamous punch by Kermit Washington on Rudy Tomjanovich and A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, the classic ‘behind the scenes for a season’ sports book. Jeff Pearlman’s two fantastic books on the Lakers - Showtime and Three Ring Circus were also popular choices.
My own recommendation from the list is The Miracle of St Anthony's: A Season with Coach Bob Hurley and Basketball's Most Improbable Dynasty by Adrian Wojnarowski.
Of those I haven’t read, I’m most excited to read Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding... Its Purloined Basketball Team, And The Dream Of Becoming A World Class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. Looks to be much more than a basketball book and those that recommended it described it as astonishing, wide-ranging and brilliant.
You can see all 33 basketball books that made the list by checking out the full list at The List or The List - Writers’ Choices.
🥊 Boxing
I love boxing books more than any other sports books. So many wonderful books - you could fill a bookshelf with great books just on Muhammad Ali alone. There were two boxing books that were particular popular with those contributing to the list.
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick was chosen more times than any other book on the list. While it focuses on a brief period in the history of heavyweight boxing, it captures so much about Ali and America in the 1960s. Don McRae described it as ‘a book which reminded me that, through boxing, you can write about so much more than the fights that take place in the ring’.
The second hugely popular choice is Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing by Donald McRae, a brilliant behind the scenes look at the careers of boxers such as Chris Eubank, James Toney and Roy Jones. As one contributor put it ‘Don is the master. No one finds the humanity of their subjects as him’. Two of Don’s other books are also on the list inlcuding the exceptional In Sunshine Or In Shadow: How Boxing Brought Hope in the Troubles which is one of the very best books you’ll ever read.
Other popular choices included two personal favourites This Bloody Mary Is The Last Thing I Own by Jonathan Rendall and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson by Geoffrey Ward.
My own personal recommendation is Night Train (also published as The Devil and Sonny Liston) by Nick Tosches - a dark, lyrical, beautiful book. I’m cheating and picking a second book here as I’d never miss an opportunity to praise the wonderful Bundini: Don't Believe the Hype by Todd D. Snyder.
You can see all the boxing books that made the list by checking out the full list at The List or The List - Writers’ Choices.
🚴🎾 🏏🏇 Other Sports 🏃🏉🏌️♂️🏒
The list contains hundreds of recommendations for books on other sports outside the main five above as well as books that cover a multitude of sports or issues affecting sports in general For a bunch of other sports, usually one book appeared as the most popular choice.
On cycling 🚴 Rough Ride: Behind the Wheel With a Pro Cyclist by Paul Kimmage was a hugely popular choice. Dave Hannigan and Jeremy Wilson both praised it’s rawness and bravery in exposing the drug culture in Kimmage’s own sport. On tennis, 🎾 Open by Andre Agassi was unsurprisingly widely chosen as an all time favourite. It’s among the very best sporting autobiographies. On cricket, unsurprisingly, 🏏 Beyond A Boundary by CLR James was the most popular but I’m also excited to read The Cricket War: The Inside Story Of Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket by Gideon Haigh.
On athletics, the fantastic 🎽💉The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final by Richard Moore was by far the most picked. I also can’t miss an opportunity to recommend one of my all time favourite books 🏃 The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It by Neal Bascomb.
On rugby 🏉, I had hoped to include more books, but struggled to get recommendations from many rugby writers. The most popular choice was another Kimmage book, Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson which a heart-breaking but ultimately uplifting book about an extraordinary young man dealing with the horrific consequences of injury.
Two golf books were particularly popular 🏌️♂️ A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour by John Feinstein and 🏌️♂️ Four Iron in the Soul by Lawrence Donegan. Book are fantastic and well worth checking out. On Ice hockey no one book was chosen more than others but I love 🏒 The Game by Ken Dryden so highlighting this choice here.
Other popular choices are 🏇 Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand,🎱 Pocket Money: Bad Boys, Business Heads and Boom-time Snooker by Gordon Burn, and 🚣 The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown.
Finally, the list includes a sports fiction category which is an area I am much less familiar with. The overwhelmingly popular choices of novels were The Damned United by David Peace and A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.
You can see all the books that made the list by checking out the full list at The List or The List - Writers’ Choices.
A note on the list’s inherent biases
Every ‘best of’ or ‘most loved’ list is inherently biased based on the profile of the respondents. This is a widely sourced list but it also reflects the fact that my own twitter following is disproportionately made up of middle-aged men from English speaking countries. I sought as broad a range of input as possible but worth noting the above nonetheless. I also have surprisingly few golf, rugby and cricket books listed - whether they lack crossover appeal or its a quirk of who responded, I’m not sure.
I hope you enjoyed this and please do check out the full lists and share widely. This has been the most fun project I’ve worked on since starting the blog and newsletter. I’d like to sincerely thank the wonderful writers who contributed their thoughts with such enthusiasm. Let me know if the list inspires you to pick up any of the books listed. And, as always, Happy Reading!
As a competitive runner my whole life I am flabbergasted Running with the Buffaloes is not on there.
I was lucky enough to interview David Maraniss after the release of his book on Jim Thorpe. He is smart, thoughtful, and incredibly skillful; not to mention he is just a nice man to chat with. Read all his books!