Sports Biblio Digest, 1.24.16
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday, free of charge. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 25, published Jan. 24, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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Solo Adventurers and a Common Man’s Plimpton
This week on the Sports Biblio blog I tried something different, and went a little off the reservation a bit, in highlighting new books about extreme sports and activities that go far beyond athletic competition.
On Monday I wrote about death-defying extreme sports and two athletes who paid the ultimate price for the thrills and a certain kind of freedom that comes with them. The 2013 deaths of freediver Nick Mevoli and X-Games freestyle snowmobiler Caleb Moore serve as an intriguing contrast to safety anxieties being raised today about injuries to American football players.
The exploits of survivalist hiker Sarah Marquis and her forthcoming memoir “Wild in Nature” was the subject of Wednesday’s post. She endured many hardships during her solo 10,000-mile journey across Asia and Australia over a three-year period, but writes that she needs “quiet time” to escape the noise and speed of contemporary civilization.
While Marquis’ journeys aren’t exactly competitive sports, I wanted to learn why “extreme” adventurers like her, Mevoli, Moore and others are driven to the degree that they are. It’s a level of understanding that escapes me.
On Friday I reviewed a book about variations on a George Plimpton theme. Unlike “Paper Lion,” Jon Hart adventures deeply into the fringes of sports in "Man Versus Ball." The author takes mascot lessons from a man who once flapped around Philadelphia Eagles games as “Bird Brain” and was fired by three NHL teams for his antics. Hart also tries his hand at semi-pro football, roller basketball and soccer and fake wrestling, but enjoyed being a Yankee Stadium hot dog vendor a whole lot more.
Maraniss on Football’s Vexations
In the latest edition of The New York Review of Books, journalist, author and Vince Lombardi biographer David Maraniss writes about several films and books addressing concussions in pro football and the growing riches in college football. A lifelong Green Bay Packers fan, he tried going “off football,” troubled by the damage the violence in the game is doing to players: “I imagined what it would be like to be Garry Wills, who once told me that he had never watched ESPN.”
Among the books included in Maraniss' article is “Billion-Dollar Ball,” which I reviewed recently, and “The Game’s Not Over,” which I will review before Super Bowl 50 in a couple of weeks.
I’ve also written about American football and sports culture and another book in Maraniss’ review, Steve Almond's “Against Football.” This author's hectoring self-righteousness, aimed at football fans, is sadly typical of what's emanating from American sports media these days about a topic that deserves less polemical attention.
Two Aging Quarterbacks, One Last Time
Sunday’s AFC championship game figures to be the last meeting between Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. Their rivalry is the subject of a recent book by Gary Myers, who was a guest on NPR's “Only a Game.” Joe Posnanski examines the previous Brady-Manning games, and the comparison to Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson has been an inevitable storyline all week.
An Off-Night at the Opera
In one of his Top 10 lists, David Letterman made a reference to NBA players as “big sweaty ballerinas." One of the biggest big men in the league, 7-foot-1 Pau Gasol of the Bulls, isn’t into dance that we know of. But he and teammate Nikola Marotic spend rare evenings away from basketball attending opera, symphony and other highbrow events; The Wall Street Journal examines their cultivated tastes.
Dodgeball-Haters, Rejoice
Another reason to love Atlas Obscura: This piece on non-comformist gyms for those who hated the stupid stuff that used to pass for physical education classes in school. Imagine that: workout spots for geeks.
Sports Book News
Two basketball-related books are being published this week. “Life is Not an Accident,” by former Duke All-American Jay Williams, details his recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle crash that ended his NBA career (HarperCollins; excerpt). Sportswriter Bill Reynolds’ latest is “Hope: A School, a Team, A Dream,” about New England prep hoopsters trying to win a championship at a high school in decline. (St. Martin’s).
Several anthologies by the late golf writer Herbert Warren Wind are available Tuesday in e-book form by Open Road Media. The titles include “America’s Gift to Golf: Herbert Warren Wind on the Masters,” “Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book,” “Following Through: Writings on Golf” and “The Gilded Age of Sport: 1945-1960.”
“The Man Behind the Goal,” a new short story collection by venerable soccer writer Brian Glanville, has been published by WSC Books Ltd., the book publishing arm of the British soccer magazine When Saturday Comes.
The EightByEight soccer magazine is featuring shots from “More Than Just a Game,” a new photo book about Scottish club Albion Rovers F.C.
Passings
Bill Johnson, 55, the brash Californian who at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics became the first American to win a gold medal in downhill skiing. He suffered several strokes in recent years and a traumatic brain injury after attempting a skiing comeback in 2001.
Johnny Bach, 91, assistant coach of the Chicago Bulls during the early Michael Jordan years and architect of the team’s “Doberman defense.”
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