Showing titles in Sports History

Every year, hundreds of horses die on the racetrack. Why? Death of a Racehorse delves deep into the horse racing world, offering intimate access to dozens of top trainers, owners, breeders, veterinarians, lab specialists, and more. The mainstream perception has been that rampant drug use is forcing these horses to run past their natural ability, resulting in heart attacks and broken legs. But this doesn’t paint the full picture.

Peter Golenbock brings to life baseball greats from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s through timeless stories told straight from the players themselves. Like the enduring classic The Glory of Their Times, this book features the reminiscences of baseball legends, pulled from hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the author. The players interviewed were All-Stars, Hall of Famers, and heroes to many, and their impact on the national pastime is still seen to this day. Baseball history comes alive, offering a fascinating account of the golden age of baseball.

In 1965, 18-year old Lew Alcindor played basketball for Coach John Wooden at UCLA. It was the beginning of what was to become a 50-year long relationship. On the court they broke basketball records. Off the court they transcended their athletic achievements to gain even wider recognition and tremendous national respect.

In 1967, seven young men, members of a twelve-man expedition led by twenty-four-year-old Joe Wilcox, were stranded at 20,000 feet on Alaska's Mount McKinley in a vicious Arctic storm. Ten days passed while the storm raged, yet no rescue was mounted. All seven perished in what remains the most tragic expedition in American climbing history.

He was the biggest man baseball has ever produced. Babe Ruth transcended the sport that brought him fame, money, and adulation, moving beyond the limits of baselines and outfield fences into the mainstream of American life. In this extraordinary biography, Creamer uncovers the complex and captivating man behind the legend.

Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured 25 conference titles, finished 34 times among the country's top ten, and played in 53 bowl games.

The authors of the New York Times best seller 50 Years, 50 Moments celebrate the first 100 years of the National Football League, interweaving history, personal stories, memories, and observations of some of its greatest players, coaches, and advocates to chronicle football’s amazing evolution from a fledgling regional fly-by-night operation into a multi-billion global brand and one of America’s leading franchises.

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. It is the toughest ticket in sports, with black-market tickets selling for $10,000 and more. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum facade of this famous Augusta course.

In 1975, a group of amazing women rowed their way to international success and glory, battling sexual prejudice, bureaucracy, and male domination. Among the members of the first international women's crew team - and one of the first women's teams anywhere - were Gail Pearson, the soft-spoken MIT professor who fought to win the political battles necessary for her team to succeed; lead rower Carie Graves, a statuesque bohemian from rural Wisconsin who dropped out of college and later became the most intense rower of the crew; and Lynn Stillman, a tiny 16-year-old, Californian coxswain.

ECW was one extreme contradiction piled on top of another. It was an incredibly influential company in the world of professional wrestling during the 1990s, yet it was never profitable. It portrayed itself as the ultimate in anti-authority rebellion, but its leadership was, at various points, working covertly with the two wrestling giants, the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. Most of all, it blurred the line between real life and the fantasy world of professional wrestling like no other company before it.

The summer of 1984 was a watershed moment in the birth of modern sports when the nation watched Michael Jordan grow from college basketball player to professional athlete and star. That summer also saw ESPN’s rise to media dominance as the country’s premier sports network and the first modern, commercialized, profitable Olympics. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s rivalry raged, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe reigned in tennis, and Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon made pro wrestling a business, while Donald Trump pierced the national consciousness as a pro football team owner.

The task facing Steve Stricker at the 2021 Ryder Cup was enormous. It was his job, as the American captain, to stare down almost 40 years of Ryder Cup history, break a pattern of home losses that had persisted almost as long, and reverse the tide of European dominance in one of golf's most tense and emotional events. This was the epitome of a must-win, but it was also something more—in the entire 93-year history of the event, no American side had ever faced this kind of pressure.

Yoga in its authentic form is focused on inclusivity, inner work and peace. But the yoga that is practised in the Western world has got a little lost along the way… Join Nikita Desai on her mission to help us understand yoga beyond the physical poses and pricey outfits that we’re so familiar with today. Drawing on research and teachings from ancient sources, Desai helps us navigate this complex practice.

In the fall of 1992, America's national pastime is in crisis and already on the path to the unthinkable: cancelling a World Series for the first time in history. The owners are at war with each other, their decades-long battle with the players has turned America against both sides, and the players' growing addiction to steroids will threaten the game's very foundation.

Since 1950, the instantly recognizable voice of Vin Scully has invited listeners to “pull up a chair” for his peerless play-by-play sports reporting. Recruited and mentored by the legendary Red Barber, Scully has narrated NBC’s Game of the Week, twelve All-Star Games, eighteen no-hitters, and twenty-five World Series, describing players from Duke Snider to Orel Hershiser to Manny Ramirez, with hundreds in between.

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season's NFL Championship game. Football was still greatly over-shadowed by the country's favored pastime - baseball - but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.

On the field and roaming the sidelines were 17 future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry.

The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports.

The pro football season of 1963 was dominated by the unexpected. In April, months prior to the beginning of play, it was revealed that two All-Star players, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, were gambling on the sport and would be suspended from play for at least a year. Even worse, in May, one of the league’s bigger-than-life personalities, Big Daddy Lipscomb, was found dead, with police saying he perished from a heroin overdose, something those who knew him best still dispute.

He was always destined to be a champion. Royally bred, with English and American classic winners in his pedigree, Sir Barton shone from birth, dubbed the "king of them all". But after a winless two-year-old season and a near-fatal illness, uncertainty clouded the start of Sir Barton's three-year-old season. Then his surprise victory in America's signature race, the Kentucky Derby, started him on the road to history, where he would go on to dominate the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, completing America's first Triple Crown.

This book is about the batters who see what mortals don’t. Javed Miandad purposefully makes errors to manipulate the field, Sachin Tendulkar dug up a pitch to take on Warne, Shivnarine Chanderpaul practised non-stop on a beach with tennis balls until he mastered technique and Joe Root’s great play against spin is known to be a confluence of three random events. Others, such as Smith, Pietersen and Richards, carried on the work of a man 100 years before their time, and Ranji changed cricket with a bucket.

Who was the most famous athlete one hundred years ago? A horse. In fact, harness racer Dan Patch was more than a celebrity, he was once the most recognizable figure in American sports. Born with a bad leg and nearly euthanized in 1896, Dan Patch led an ordinary wagon horse existence, pulling the grocer’s cart in Oxford, Indiana. It was when he won a race at the Indiana State Fair that Dan Patch’s fame began to build.