The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time

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51	Laughing in the Hills
	By Bill Barich (1980)
Nearing 40 and faced with the death of his mother and a failing marriage, Barich checks into a hotel near Golden Gate Fields racetrack and stays for the season. As he gambles alongside a flock of railbirds, he becomes, he says in this evocative memoir, "Restored if not Renewed."
52	Dollar Sign on the Muscle
	By Kevin Kerrane (1984)
The author spent a year with the Phillies' scouts when they were arguably the best judges of raw talent in the major leagues. The often hard lives of baseball's underpaid hunter-gatherers are rendered in lively detail. (See the decoding of scout-speak in chapter 5.)
53	The Bronx Zoo
	By Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock (1979)
After this book Lyle was no longer known as just a Cy Young Award-winning reliever; he was the guy who liked to sit bare-assed on teammates' birthday cakes. His hilarious as-told-to proves that a talented team canfeud and ego-trip its way to the World Series.
54	The Professional
	By W.C. Heinz (1958)
Hemingway called this dialogue-driven portrayal of the monthlong run-up to a championship middleweight bout "the only good novel I've ever read about a fighter." Young Elmore Leonard was so inspired by it that he sent his first (and last) fan letter to Heinz.
55	The Baseball Encyclopedia
	By MacMillan (Publisher) (1969)
Sure, you can find stats galore on the Internet. But for those who relish paging through career numbers and debating whether Smokey Burgess was better than Ed Bailey, this tome, which is revised every few years, is the final authority.
56	A Savage Business
	By Richard Hoffer (1998)
In what kind of world can Mike Tyson emerge from prison to discover that "raping a teenager had turned out to be a great career decision"? Only in the unseemly universe of heavyweight boxing. SI's Hoffer relentlessly peppers the sport with body blows.
57	The Glory of Their Times
	By Lawrence Ritter (1966)
Ritter spent six years tracking down professional baseball players from the early 1900s, then stepped aside to let them tell their remarkable stories in their own words. Virtually all of these men are gone now, but thanks to Ritter they'll never be forgotten.
58	The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball
	Edited by John Thorn (1999)
This one-volume reissue of an esteemed two-volume collection includes essays and fiction, profiles and columns by such first-rank writers as Roger Angell, Stephen Jay Gould and John Updike. Abbott and Costello's Who's on First? also cracks the lineup of 114 entries.
59	Among the Thugs
	By Bill Buford (1991)
While he was editing the literary magazine Granta in London, Buford, an American, spent his weekends with soccer hooligans, whose violence both repulsed and mesmerized him. Newsweek called this "one of the most unnerving books you will ever read."
60	Lords of the Realm
	By John Helyar (1994)
Helyar, a Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author of the best-selling Barbarians at the Gate, turns a critical eye to the businessmen who have run baseball for the past century. He delivers a withering analysis of the owners' inability to manage themselves or the game.
61	The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.
	By Robert Coover (1968)
The protagonist in this mind-bending novel, J. Henry Waugh, invents a baseball board game, only to become so obsessed with the tabletop world he creates that he begins to lose his grip on reality -- especially after one of his players dies from a beanball.
62	Days of Grace
	By Arthur Ashe with Arnold Rampersad (1993)
This autobiography, completed shortly before Ashe died of AIDS, recounts the groundbreaking career of the Wimbledon champion turned social activist. After reading Days in prison, Mike Tyson had Ashe's face tattooed on his left biceps.
63	Out of Their League
	By Dave Meggyesy (1970)
Readers were shocked by the brutality and rampant drug use in Meggyesy's memoir of his days as an NFL linebacker. This was one of the first books to focus on what the author calls the "dehumanizing" experience of the modern professional athlete.
64	Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf
	By John Updike (1996)
"I am curiously, disproportionately, undeservedly happy on a golf course," the author writes. This collection of 30 fiction and nonfiction pieces, highlighted by the fantastical short story "Farrell's Caddie," elicits the same response in the reader.
65	In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle
	By Madeleine Blais (1995)
Blais, a Pulitzer Prize winner, here follows the 1992-93 season of the Amherst (Mass.) High School girls hoops team from tryouts to the state championship. Her deftly drawn profiles provide insights into how important sports and winning can be for young women.
66	They Call Me Coach
	By John Wooden with Jack Tobin (1972)
Wooden's story is refreshingly free of the tedious "coach as CEO" lectures now so common in the genre. The book includes the Wooden Pyramid of Success, a guide for life and basketball that has been posted in many coaches' offices. Updated and reissued in 1988.
67	Cosell
	By Howard Cosell (1973)
"Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, persecuting, distasteful, verbose, a show-off," Cosell writes. "I have been called all of these. Of course, I am." In his first book Cosell told it like it was and blew cigar smoke in the face of the sports establishment.
68	Down the Fairway
	By Bobby Jones and O.B. Keeler (1927)
Jones begins by apologizing for publishing an autobiography at age 25. But his book, which discusses excellence in golf (Jones had already won the U.S. and British Opens) as part of a life well lived, is an elegant, deeply personal document that is surely something to celebrate.
69	Big Game, Small World
	By Alexander Wolff (2002)
Wolff embarks on a 17-country journey -- getting in a pickup game with two members of the royal family in Bhutan and visiting the masters of the crossover dribble in Peoria -- to test his contention that basketball is an "intercultural epoxy."
70	The Last Shot
	By Darcy Frey (1994)
If Coney Island means fun to you, then you don't know it like the students at Abraham Lincoln High School do. Frey follows the fortunes of the teenage Stephon Marbury and others who try to play their way out of the "ghetto school for the projects" with varying success.
71	Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder
	By Arnold Schwarzenegger and Douglas Kent Hall (1977)
The summer that Schwarzenegger turned 15 in Austria, he discovered bodybuilding and told his father, "I want to be the best-built man in the world. Then I want to go to America and be in movies." Ahhnuld's brazenness and passion make this an inspiring read.
72	Out of the Bunker and Into the Trees
	By Rex Lardner (1960)
Ring's nephew Rex was an accomplished tennis player and a two-time Big Ten wrestling champ, but this hilarious send-up of golf culture might have been his greatest achievement. It's a book that's hard to find but worth the effort.
73	The Fight
	By Norman Mailer (1975)
Mailer can come off as a self-important blowhard, but the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle provided such inherent drama that his heated prose -- lionizing both combatants, but especially Ali -- seems perfectly appropriate.
74	Only the Ball Was White
	By Robert Peterson (1970)
The Negro Leagues, which had folded two decades earlier, were fading from memory when Peterson wrote this landmark history, sparking renewed interest in the leagues and restoring Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and other black stars to their rightful place in baseball's pantheon.
75	Harvey Penick's Little Red Book
	By Harvey Penick with Bud Shrake (1992)
Penick spent six decades jotting down his folksy wisdom in a red Scribbletex notebook, never intending to publish it. Golfers everywhere should be thankful that, at 87, he decided to share his tips, garnered from teaching hackers and famous pros alike.

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