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.[Made into a movie]
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.[ New York Times best-seller][Made into a movie]
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.[ New York Times best-seller]
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.[Authors with other list-worthy books]
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.[Made into a movie]
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.[Made into a movie]
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.[Authors with other list-worthy books]
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.[Out of print][ New York Times best-seller][Authors with other list-worthy books]
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.[Out of print][ New York Times best-seller][Authors with other list-worthy books]
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.[ New York Times best-seller]
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