Sports books worth reading even if you hate sports
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Stories where the final score is the least of it. The best sports writing is about everything the game drags in with it.
Hand-picked and sealed. Every book here was chosen on purpose — no votes, no algorithm.
Stacked by Drayfus · Updated 1 hour ago
The 9 books on this stack
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Boys in the Boat
Daniel James Brown · 2013
Describes the American rowing team's triumphant and unlikely win during the 1936 Olympics.
Why this book Drayfus
Nine broke college kids row their way out of the Depression and into Hitler's Olympics. The rowing is maybe a tenth of it; the rest is hunger, timber camps, dead mothers, and a coach who barely speaks
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Friday Night Lights 12 Copy Floor Display
Buzz Bissinger · 1990
Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business. In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control; in good times, its murder rate skyrockets. But every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true.
Why this book Drayfus
Bissinger moved to a Texas town where the high-school stadium seats 19,000 and wrote down what that does to a place. Sociology with a scoreboard attached.
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Open
Andre Agassi · 2009
From Andre Agassi, one of the most beloved athletes in history and one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court, a beautiful, haunting autobiography. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century Agassi’s incredibly rigorous training begins when he is just a child. By the age of thirteen, he is banished to a Florida tennis camp that feels like a prison camp. Lonely, scared, a ninth-grade dropout, he rebels in ways that will soon make him a 1980s icon. He dyes his hair, pierces his ears, dresses like a punk rocker. By the time he turns pro at sixteen, his new look promises to change tennis forever, as does his lightning-fast return. And yet, despite his raw talent, he struggles early on. We feel his confusion as he loses to the world’s best, his greater confusion as he starts to win. After stumbling in three Grand Slam finals, Agassi shocks the world, and himself, by capturing the 1992 Wimbledon. Overnight he becomes a fan favorite and a media target. Agassi brings a near-photographic memory to every pivotal match and every relationship. Never before has the inner game of tennis and the outer game of fame been so precisely limned. Alongside vivid portraits of rivals from several generations—Jimmy Connors, Pete Sampras, Roger Federer—Agassi gives unstinting accounts of his brief time with Barbra Streisand and his doomed marriage to Brooke Shields. He reveals a shattering loss of confidence. And he recounts his spectacular resurrection, a comeback climaxing with his epic run at the 1999 French Open and his march to become the oldest man ever ranked number one. In clear, taut prose, Agassi evokes his loyal brother, his wise coach, his gentle trainer, all the people who help him regain his balance and find love at last with Stefanie Graf. Inspired by her quiet strength, he fights through crippling pain from a deteriorating spine to remain a dangerous opponent in the twenty-first and final year of his career. Entering his last tournament in 2006, he’s hailed for completing a stunning metamorphosis, from nonconformist to elder statesman, from dropout to education advocate. And still he’s not done. At a U.S. Open for the ages, he makes a courageous last stand, then delivers one of the most stirring farewells ever heard in a sporting arena. With its breakneck tempo and raw candor, Open will be read and cherished for years. A treat for ardent fans, it will also captivate readers who know nothing about tennis. Like Agassi’s game, it sets a new standard for grace, style, speed, and power.
Why this book Drayfus
Agassi opens by telling you he hates tennis, then spends 400 pages showing why he kept playing anyway. The most honest celebrity memoir I've read, in any field.
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Moneyball
Michael Lewis · 2003
"One of the best baseball—and management—books out.... Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard). I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors. What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win... how can we not cheer for David?
Why this book Drayfus
A broke team decides the whole sport measures talent wrong, then bets the season on it. Lewis writes about markets and stubborn old men; the baseball is almost incidental.
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The secret race
Tyler Hamilton · 2012
Hamilton pulls back the curtain on the Tour de France and takes us into the secret world of professional cycling like never before: the doping, the lying, and his years as Lance Armstrong's teammate on U.S. Postal.
Why this book Drayfus
Hamilton doped for years alongside Armstrong, then told everything. Reads like a heist confession, with the extra chill that the heist was his own body.
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Born to Run
Christopher McDougall · 2009
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The astonishing and hugely entertaining story that completely changed the way we run. An epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? “Equal parts quest, physiology treatise, and running history.... The climactic race reads like a sprint.... It simply makes you want to run.” —Outside Magazine Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America’s best ultra-runners against the tribe. McDougall’s incredible story will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that you, indeed all of us, were born to run. Look for Born to Run 2, out now!
Why this book Drayfus
Starts with a sore foot and ends in a canyon ultramarathon alongside a hidden tribe. McDougall argues humans evolved to run long, which is a strange thing to find persuasive from a couch.
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Beyond a Boundary
C. L. R. James · 1963
A welcome reissue of one of the greatest sports books ever written, this book transcends its genre and subject and has become a classic. C. L. R. James, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching, and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, as well as the issues of class, race, and politics that surround it. Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defense of cricket as an art form, and part indictment of colonialism, this book addresses not just a sport but a whole culture, asking the question "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"
Why this book Drayfus
James uses cricket to write about growing up colonial in Trinidad, and what Englishness looks like from underneath. People who never watch cricket keep calling it the best sports book ever written.
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Gold
Chris Cleave · 2012
Building on the tradition of "Little Bee," Chris Cleave again writes with elegance, humor, and passion about friendship, marriage, parenthood, tragedy, and redemption. "Gold" is the story of Zoe and Kate, world-class athletes who have been friends and rivals since their first day of Elite training. They've loved, fought, betrayed, forgiven, consoled, gloried, and grown up together. Now on the eve of London 2012, their last Olympics, both women will be tested to their physical and emotional limits. They must confront each other and their own mortality to decide, when lives are at stake: "What would you sacrifice for the people you love, if it meant giving up the thing that was most important to you in the world?"
Why this book Drayfus
Two friends, twenty years of racing each other, one Olympic spot left. The velodrome scenes are tense, but the book turns on a sick little girl and what her mother is willing to give up.
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Beartown
Fredrik Backman · 2017
Now an HBO Limited Series From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anxious People , a dazzling and profound novel about a small town with a big dream—and the price required to make it come true. People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys. Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected. Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.
Why this book Drayfus
A small hockey town pins its future on its junior team, then something happens at a party, and everyone has to choose what to believe. The hockey is scaffolding for a story about what communities forgive.