Calling All Sports

Suggested reading for both fans and non-fans

I’ve always extolled the idea that good writing is good writing, whatever the genre or topic. Thus, it’s not unreasonable for me, in a Substack all about arts and culture, to bring to your attention some favorite books of mine in an area which has given me a lifetime of pleasure, as both aficionado and reader: sports.

One of the benefits of logging all of my reading (which I’ve done since 1993), is that I can find the answer there to questions that suddenly arise in my mind: How many sports books have I read over that time? What would be my personal favorites and for what reasons? What sports by their nature are more conducive to eliciting high-quality writing? How many of those books are penned by someone whose main claim to fame is their writing outside of the sphere of sports?

Well, I studied the reading log and hope by sharing my findings about the 162 sports books I’ve read since 1993, you will encounter a title or two (or ten) you may want to add to your reading list. I’ll present my findings in ascending order of books read per sport, plus identify a favorite (and occasional honorable mentions) in each category.

Sports with three or less books read: Olympics, Tennis, Horseracing, Crew, Ice Hockey, Sailing

Some books I’ll recommend later I trust will be new to you. In this case we have a massive bestseller. Laura Hillenbrand’s story of Seabiscuit will take you back to the 1930’s, when horseracing was near or at the top of the sports diet of so many Americans. Seabiscuit’s story epitomizes the cliche “Stranger than Fiction” and it’s fair to say that the less you know about the arc of Seabiscuit’s career, the more you’ll be caught up in the suspense. Somehow, despite my claim about the literary value of sports writing, a key attribute of so many of my favorites is wondering how the various games, seasons, and career arcs will play out.

Honorable Mention: The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown - Like Seabiscuit, Brown’s book is a bestseller for a reason, with its compelling story of the 1936 United States Olympic crew eight.

Football (8 titles)

Even though I have occasional pangs of guilt about giving my attention to football, devastating injuries and all, I have been a lifelong fan. Yet, I wasn’t surprised to see how small a percentage of my sports reading was about America’s current national pastime. If I could name one adjective associated with those sports higher on my reading list, it would be “pastoral” which football definitely is not. Buzz Bissinger’s book about the central place of football in West Texas and how it defines the lives of young athletes for better or for worse, is by far the best of the football titles. You’ll note that so far, all of the books I’ve mentioned have been well served with adaptations for film, TV, or in the case of Friday Night Lights, both. By the way, Google tells me that Bissinger’s book is both Creative Nonfiction and Sports Fiction. The former is true of all the best sports books, the latter is head scratching wrong.

Sports Fiction (9 Titles)

Much of Don DeLillo’s early fiction involved sports. In fact, for Delillo completists, you must read Amazons: An Intimate Memoir By the First Woman to Play in the National Hockey League, which DeLillo authored using the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell. Underworld is hardly a sports novel, but I first became aware of it when Harper’s magazine published the prologue in 1992. Said prologue was a vivid set-piece about the 1951 National League Dodgers-Giants playoff game, decided by Bobby Thomson’s home run. The novel’s young protagonist retrieves that ball in the bleachers, and we follow its trajectory over time in DeLillo’s book, which otherwise is a panoply of American life and paranoias over many decades. Don’t let the book’s size or literary pedigree deter you; this is DeLillo at his most entertaining.

Honorable Mention: Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. One of my favorite books of all time, Wallace’s massive tome may be more than you can handle (but try, try, try), but I can’t help but mention it here. If you only took the portions of Infinite Jest that were about tennis, you’d have a normal-sized novel penned by a clear tennis nerd.

Soccer (11 Titles)

Perhaps it’s the nature of the game, or maybe it’s just its worldwide appeal, but soccer seems to draw the attention of more literary novelists than any other sport. Home and Away is the product of two novelists, Fredrik Ekelung, new to me, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose mammoth multi-volume My Struggle is a personal favorite of mine (yes, I love massive novels!). The book is the back-and-forth correspondence between the two as they follow the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, and is rich in observations about soccer and about life as global citizens.

Honorable Mention: Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby - Here’s a book with a crazy film adaptation, chronicling a lifetime Red Sox fan played by Jimmy Fallon, as his life reaches its grand climax with the team’s 2004 World Series triumph. Skip the movie but enjoy the book and the universal aspects of fandom as Hornby embraces his beloved Arsenal through good times and bad.

Kick and Run: Memoir With Soccer Ball, Jonathan Wilson - I’ve mentioned Wilson before, in recommending that you join us at his High Tea Book Club in Newton. I have to put in a plug for his book. Wilson is a well-regarded novelist and teacher but he seems to studiously avoid both topics in his memoir in order to focus on his Judaism, his various home countries, and his true love, soccer. I can vouch for that love, as he races to get to book club meetings while trying to catch the end of the latest Tottenham Spurs game on the telly.

The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, Joe McGinniss - Still another book about soccer by a writer whose other books, both fact and fiction, are not sports books at all. Here’s the story of a team and a league I knew nothing about, and found as compelling as the best fiction, with suspense, quirky characters, and a narrator who makes himself a part of the story.

General Sports (12 Titles)

Most of the books in this category feature the writing of sportswriters and columnists whose work covers multiple sports. To a Bostonian of a certain age, Ray Fitzgerald’s columns in the Boston Globe represented the single best series of writing pieces he or she might have encountered as a young person whose primary source of reading material was the sports pages. A side benefit of this title is all the fond memories it will stir up of Boston sporting figures from the 1970s. Plus, Fitzgerald is really funny!

Basketball (14 Titles)

Basketball is the only indoor sport in the upper echelon of my list, but it’s there only because I’m a fan of the late John Feinstein, who single-handedly moves my count to double-digits. His work is inconsistent in quality, but his best work follows closely a number of players and coaches as they navigate a season in their various sports. The Last Amateurs is the best of the best, telling the story of a season of Patriot League basketball, where one or two athletes have hopes to go pro and the rest compete for the love of the game while actually attending classes in college. With what’s happening these days in college sports, Feinstein here reminds us of what used to make college sport so appealing.

Cricket (17 titles)

While on vacation in London in 1982, I spent a memorable day at Lord’s Cricket Grounds watching a one-day county match and, thanks to the eight hours I was there, figuring out most of the rules of cricket. I’ve maintained a casual interest since then. When it comes down to the overlap between sports and quality writing, the games that attract the best tend to be outdoors in green space, casually paced, with players that can show their face (no masking behind helmets) and their personalities. Thus, cricket. I actually read C.L.R. James’ book before that fateful date at Lord’s because some publication or other called it the greatest sports book ever. It may well be, as James confronts two quite different facts about himself. As a political activist and Marxist, James was a major figure in the movement for African independence. Yet, he absolutely loved cricket, a sport closely associated with England’s colonial reign. He finds a way to intertwine provocatively those two worlds. You need not be into cricket to be into this book.

Baseball (46 titles)

If my reading list started from birth rather than from 1993, I fear to think how high this number would be. As a boy, my favorite thing in the world was baseball; I date a slackening of interest to 1994 and the baseball strike that led to their being no World Series that year, which makes it interesting that I still read so many baseball books in the last 30 years. The Long Season is one I read both as a boy and as an adult. Unlike most books by athletes, Jim Brosnan didn’t use a ghost writer; his diary of the 1959 season, when both he and his two teams that year were mediocre, perfectly conveys the day to day pleasures and ennui of a baseball season. Don’t confuse this with Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, a similar, far-more famous, and much lesser book.

Honorable Mention: Faithful, Stewart O’Nan and Stephen KIng - Here’s another book jointly authored by two novelists. O’Nan does most of the heavy lifting, but the real appeal of this book is that it has a you-are-there immediacy as the Red Sox reward their faithful by toppling the Yankees and winning their first pennant in 86 years.

Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, Donald Hall - I didn’t love this book, but it’s by a poet, for pete’s sake, which helps prove my point about pastoral sports and writers’ interests.

And finally…

Golf (48 titles)

It’s mostly an accident of timing that golf tops my list. I jumped on the golf bandwagon with the emergence of Tiger Woods on the PGA tour in 1996 and couldn’t get enough of golf for a decade and a half: biographies, histories, tournament recaps, books on golf course design, Golf For Dummies: I read them all. I’m glad to anoint Herbert Warren Wind as the best of the best since it gives me a chance to mention Roger Angell, my favorite sports writer ever, all of whose books I read before 1993. Both Angell and Wind wrote for the New Yorker, and thanks to the combination of the high standards of the magazine and the generous space their writers were allowed, we get the benefit of nicely detailed, leisurely pieces, perfectly suited to the pace of their respective sports.

Honorable Mention: Who’s Your Caddy? Rick Reilly - Funny throughout, with the added bonus that you too can see what it would feel like to caddy for Donald Trump. Hint: It’s as dispiriting as you’d suspect. But still funny.

If you’ve made it this far, why not suggest a favorite sports title of your own by dropping it into the comments section.

Post-script: Once before I’ve shared an AI-generated podcast focused on one of my posts. Since I tried this last year, the AI has upped its game in terms of quality. Take a listen to what the “hosts” have to say about my sports reading: