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How To Turn A Big Mac Into A Linebacker: The 300-Pounder In The NFL
Excerpted from Newton's Football: The Science Behind America's Game....
How Branch Rickey Invented Modern Baseball
Excerpted from Dollar Sign on the Muscle, named by Sports Illustrated one of the top 100 sports books of all time; postscript by Sam Miller. You can read more about the new Baseball Prospectus edition of the book here, or buy it in paperback or as an e-book....
"Make Way For Brother Mike!": When Tyson Left Prison The First Time
Excerpted from A Savage Business. Republished by permission of the author; his postscript follows....
Don't Turn Your Back On A Jealous Cokehead: A Mike Tyson Life Lesson
Excerpted from Undisputed Truth, available now from Blue Rider Press....
Rickey, Mattingly, And Racism In The Eighties
Have You Seen Your Brother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows?...
The '85 Bears At The Obama White House: A Historic Photo, Annotated
In 1986, shortly before the Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears were prepared to make the annual champions' trip to the White House and meet President Ronald Reagan, the Challenger exploded. The Bears' White House visit was canceled and subsequently forgotten—until, that is October 2011, when rabid Be...
This Is What It Was Like To Play For The Qaddafis' Basketball Team
Excerpted from Qaddafi's Point Guard: The Incredible Story of a Professional Basketball Player Trapped in Libya's Civil War, which is available now from Rodale. ...
The Good Doctor
There is a long, engaging excerpt from Dr. J's new book (written with the talented Karl Taro Greenfeld) over at Grantland. Worth checking out, for sure....
J.R. Moehringer Talks About The Best American Sportswriting 2013
The guest editor for The Best American Sports Writing 2013 is the acclaimed journalist J.R. Moehringer. He's written a wonderful memoir, was co-author of a classic sports biography, and this year he published his first novel. I recently caught up with J.R. who was kind enough to spend a few moments ...
Secrets Of A Hitter: How Doug Plank Inspired The NFL's Meanest Defense
Adapted from Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), available now. ...
Book Excerpt: Shane Comes To The Metrodome
We've got a bunch of goodies for you this week on Monsters, Rich Cohen's winning new book about the 1985 Chicago Bears. First, dig this excerpt over at SI.com:...
Book Excerpt: Nicholas Dawidoff On The 2011 New York Jets
Over at Men's Journal check out this excerpt from Nicholas Dawidoff's new book, Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football:...
Campy
Check out this excerpt from Neil Lanctot's 2011 Roy Campanella biography....
Satchel: The Life And Times Of An American Legend
Satchel knew that, despite being the fastest, winningest pitcher alive, being black meant he never would get the attention he deserved. That was easy to see in the backwaters of the Negro Leagues but it remained true when he hit the Majors at age forty-two, with accusations flying that his signing w...
The Main Ingredient: Marcella
Last week, a post about the bluesman Furry Lewis, included this:...
The Gookie
Speaking of cigars, you should know the story behind Harpo Marx's in-case-of-emergence-make-this-face move:...
The Radio Game
Dig this bit from Mark Harris' short essay, “Recalling the Joy of Watching Baseball on the Radio,” which is featured in the collection Diamond: The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris. Most famous for his Henry Wiggens trilogy, Harris doesn’t argue that radio is superior to television, just that they e...
Why Lionel Messi Is Even Better Than You Think
One of the key findings of The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong is that soccer, more than any other team sport, is a weak link game: matches are won and lost, and championships and relegation are secured, by the genius and quality of a club's superstars, but even more so b...
John O'Hara Told The Truth About His Time
My father didn't care much for Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Faulkner. He loved Steinbeck. But the writer he told me to read was John O'Hara. I still have the copy of O'Hara's short stories that Dad gave me when I was in high school. ...
The Sportswriter Who Wrote American Better Than Anyone Anywheres
Below is John Lardner's introduction to a 1959 edition of Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, a fictional series of letters from professional ballplayer Jack Keefe to his friend Al. Those stories are included in the Library of America's new collection. (There was also a comic strip based on the same char...