Sports books worth reading even if you hate sports
+5 more
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 · 41 views · Updated 3 months ago
The 9 books on this stack
Tap “Want to read” on the ones that catch your eye. No account needed, we'll keep them for you.
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Daniel James Brown 2013 1 want to read
Why it's on the stack
Fierce and defiant · you come out liking people more
It shares this with 2 more books on this stack
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 -
Buzz Bissinger 1990
Why it's on the stack
You end up rooting for the wrong people · it leaves you thinking
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history.
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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Andre Agassi 2009 2 want to read
Why it's on the stack
Fierce and defiant · it's a memoir
It shares this with 2 more books on this stack
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.
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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Michael Lewis 2003 1 want to read
Why it's on the stack
It changes how you see things · it's an essay
It shares this with 1 more book on this stack
"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.
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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Tyler Hamilton 2012
Why it's on the stack
No clean hands here · it's a memoir
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
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…
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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Christopher McDougall 2009
Why it's on the stack
It makes you laugh · it's an essay
An epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt?
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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C. L. R. James 1963
Why it's on the stack
Full of big ideas · comforting, like coming home
It shares this with 1 more book on this stack
A welcome reissue of one of the greatest sports books ever written, this book transcends its genre and subject and has become a classic.
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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Chris Cleave 2012
Why it's on the stack
Nobody is entirely good
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
Building on the tradition of "Little Bee," Chris Cleave again writes with elegance, humor, and passion about friendship, marriage, parenthood, tragedy, and redemption.
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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Fredrik Backman 2017 1 want to read
Why it's on the stack
You end up rooting for the wrong people · it leaves you shaken
It shares this with 3 more books on this stack
Now an HBO Original Series “You’ll love this engrossing novel.”
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.