In the early 1900s editor Maxwell Perkins told anyone who would listen that Chicago sports columnist Ring Lardner was the most talented writer he knew, high praise given that Perkins' stable included Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. It shouldn't have come as a shock, though. Many of the country's best writers have long been fascinated with sports, and that passion shows up in their prose. After all, when done right, sportswriting transcends bats and balls to display all the traits of great literature: incision, wit, force and vision, suffused with style and substance. Herewith the editors of Sports Illustrated's favorite sports books, compiled with love and reason, out of intense and sometimes unruly discussions.
Compiled by the staff of Sports Illustrated
Text by Pete McEntegart, L. Jon Wertheim, Gene Menez and Mark Bechtel
Pound-for-pound the top boxing writer of all time, Liebling is at his bare-knuckled best here, bobbing and weaving between superb reporting and evocative prose. The fistic figures depicted in this timeless collection of New Yorker essays range from champs such as Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson to endearing palookas and eccentric cornermen on the fringes of the squared circle. Liebling's writing is efficient yet stylish, acerbic yet soft and sympathetic. ("The sweet science, like an old rap or the memory of love, follows its victims everywhere.") He leavens these flourishes with an eye for detail worthy of Henry James. The one-two combination allows him to convey how boxing can at once be so repugnant and so alluring.
2
The Boys of Summer
By Roger Kahn (1971)
A baseball book the same way Moby Dick is a fishing book, this account of the early-'50s Brooklyn Dodgers is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise's 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it. Kahn writes eloquently about the memorable games and the Dodgers' penchant for choking -- "Wait Till Next Year" is their motto -- but the most poignant passages revisit the Boys in autumn. An auto accident has rendered catcher Roy Campanella a quadriplegic. Dignified trailblazer Jackie Robinson is mourning the death of his son. Sure-handed third baseman Billy Cox is tending bar. No book is better at showing how sports is not just games.
3
Ball Four
By Jim Bouton (1970)
Though a declining knuckleballer, Bouton threw nothing but fastballs in his diary of the 1969 season. Pulling back the curtain on the seriocomic world of the big leagues, he writes honestly and hilariously about baseball's vices and virtues. At a time when the sport was still a secular religion, it was an act of heresy to portray players "pounding the Ol' Budweiser," "chasin' skirts" or "poppin' greenies." (And that was during games.) Bouton's most egregious act of sacrilege -- his biting observations about former teammate Mickey Mantle -- led to his banishment from the "Yankee family." But beyond the controversy, Ball Four was, finally, a love story. Bouton writes, "You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."
4
Friday Night Lights
By H.G. Bissinger (1990)
Schoolboy football knits together the West Texas town of Odessa in the late 1980s. But as Permian High grows into a dynasty, the locals' sense of proportion blows away like a tumbleweed. A brilliant look at how Friday-night lights can lead a town into darkness.
5
You Know Me Al
By Ring Lardner (1914)
This collection of letters from a fictional (and grammatically challenged) pitcher named Jack Keefe, originally published in installments in The Saturday Evening Post, earned Lardner a spot in the pantheon of American humorists alongside Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
6
A Season on the Brink
By John Feinstein (1986)
Bob Knight still curses the day he granted the author unfettered access to his program. Feinstein's year as an honorary Hoosier yielded an unsparing portrait of Indiana's combustible coach and spawned the best-selling sports book of all time.
7
Semi-Tough
By Dan Jenkins (1972)
Running back Billy Clyde Puckett of TCU and the Giants calls himself the "humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football." Puckett is also the funniest, and the dialogue in this raunchy novel still crackles. Also read Jenkins' golf novel, Dead Solid Perfect.
8
Paper Lion
By George Plimpton (1965)
No one today does what the fearless Plimpton once did with regularity. Here, in his first Walter Mitty-esque effort, the author of the equally brilliant Shadow Box and The Bogey Man infiltrates the Detroit training camp as a quarterback with no arm, no legs and no shot.
9
The Game
By Ken Dryden (1983)
Hall of Fame goalie Dryden was always different. A Cornell grad, he led Montreal to six Stanley Cups, then at 26 sat out a year to prepare for the bar exam. His book is different too: a well-crafted account of his career combined with a meditation on hockey's special place in Canadian culture.
10
Fever Pitch
By Nick Hornby (1991)
How can the rest of the world summon such passion for soccer? You'll understand after reading Hornby's deeply personal and wonderfully witty account of an otherwise normal bloke who develops a full-blown obsession with Arsenal, the English Premier League team.
11
A River Runs Through It
By Norman Maclean (1976)
One publisher rejected this novella because "the stories have trees in them" -- thereby missing the forest. The tale of two brothers headed in different directions also has fly-fishing and family drama, presented in prose as crisp and clear as a Montana mountain stream.
12
Seabiscuit
By Laura Hillenbrand (2001)
People who've never been to the racetrack love this book, and it's easy to see why. Hillenbrand has an irresistible story to tell, about a homely hay burner who came to dominate the Depression-era sports pages, taking a colorful crew of humans along for the ride.
13
Loose Balls
By Terry Pluto (1990)
Flip to any page of this oral history of the wild-and-woolly ABA and you can kiss the next few hours goodbye. Pluto tells almost too-good-to-be-true stories about Marvin (Bad News) Barnes, Dr. J and obscure figures such as John Brisker, the meanest man in the league.
14
Bang the Drum Slowly
By Mark Harris (1956)
Second of a quartet of baseball novels featuring star southpaw Henry Wiggen of the New York Mammoths, and a book that is in equal measures sober and silly. In this installment Wiggen's roommate and catcher, Bruce Pearson, is dying of cancer.
15
Heaven Is a Playground
By Rick Telander (1976)
The author hung around pickup games in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant section one summer and returned with this intriguing account of inner-city hoops, a trailblazer of its kind. Telander depicts the hopes -- real and false -- that the game offers its playground legends.
16
Levels of the Game
By John McPhee (1969)
This gripping point-by-point breakdown of the 1968 U.S. Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner is as much sociology as sport, with each man explaining how his background shaped his game. Also read A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee's take on a young Bill Bradley.
17
The Breaks of the Game
By David Halberstam (1981)
The Pulitzer Prize winner (for his Vietnam War coverage) focuses on the 1979-80 Trail Blazers. Like A Season on the Brink, Breaks proves that a down year can make for high drama. Halberstam's baseball books, Summer of '49 and October 1964, are also excellent.
18
The Summer Game
By Roger Angell (1972)
This collection of 21 New Yorker pieces, with gems on the woeful early Mets as well as the "flowering and deflowering of New England" during the Red Sox' 1967 "Impossible Dream" season, cemented Angell's place as the game's greatest essayist.
19
The Long Season
By Jim Brosnan (1960)
In 1959 Brosnan, a burnt-out reliever for the Cardinals and the Reds, kept a journal chronicling such things as the insecurity of superstars and the behavior of stewardesses on team flights. The result: a well-rendered inside glimpse that groomed the mound for Ball Four.
20
Instant Replay
By Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap (1968)
After a publishing exec implored him to find the "football Brosnan" (see above), Schaap corralled Kramer, a literate lineman for Lombardi's Green Bay Packers. The book climaxes with Bart Starr's sneaking behind Kramer's block to win the Ice Bowl against the Cowboys.
21
Everybody's All-American
By Frank Deford (1981)
In this novel Deford captures the romance and pageantry of 1950s football at North Carolina, then shows how star halfback Gavin Grey and his beauty-queen wife struggle after the cheering stops. Deford's 1975 biography Big Bill Tilden is also highly recommended.
22
Fat City
By Leonard Gardner (1969)
Weighing in at a trim 189 pages, Gardner's tale meticulously depicts the seedy, second-rate boxing scene in Stockton, Calif., and the desperate but hopeful men who inhabit it. Many consider this and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird to be the best two novels by one-time-only novelists.
23
The City Game
By Pete Axthelm (1970)
The master prose stylist portrays parallel basketball worlds in New York City: Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks won the 1969-70 championship, and the playgrounds of Harlem, where stars such as Earl (the Goat) Manigault burned brightly but too briefly.
24
The Natural
By Bernard Malamud (1952)
The movie was a Mawkish Rocky-in-flannels, but the novel is a darker, more subtle tale of phenom Roy Hobbs, who loses his prime years to a youthful indiscretion, then gets a second chance. TIME called the novel (which ends differently from the film) "preposterously readable."
25
North Dallas Forty
By Peter Gent (1973)
Gent was a cowboys receiver from 1964 to '68, so his darkly funny novel about a league rife with drugs and depravity left fans guessing. (Is Seth Maxwell really Dandy Don Meredith?) Also recommended: The Franchise, Gent's still-darker take on the NFL.
