Books

Always A Catch

Badasses

Ballpark

Fever

My Father’s War

Phil Jackson: The Lord of the Rings

The Glory Game

Always A Catch

From a New York Times bestselling sports writer comes the story of one boy's quest to stay true to himself without letting down his team. Jack and his father have never seen eye to eye…until Jack’s dad gives him the chance to transfer to Oakhurst his junior year. His dad sees it as a way for Jack to get into a good college; Jack sees it as refuge from his dad. Oakhurst is more than an escape—it's a chance for Jack to do something new, to try out for the football team. Once Jack makes the team, he’s thrust into a foreign world—one of intense hazing, vitamin supplements, monkey hormones and steroids. Jack has to decide how far he's willing to go to fit in—and how much he's willing to compromise himself to be the man his team wants him to be. Perfect for fans of Mike Lupica and Tim Green. Buy The Book

Badasses

A book that explores the enduring legends of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden’s Oakland Raiders, Badasses is the definitive biography of arguably the last team to play old-fashioned tough-guy football. Peter Richmond, co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Glory Game, offers a fascinating look at the 1970s Oakland Raiders, led by colorful greats from another era: Ken Stabler, Willie Brown, Gene Upshaw, Jim Otto, Art Shell, head coach John Madden, and owner Al Davis. In the bestselling vein of Boys Will Be Boys, Badasses chronicles the bar-room exploits, practice-field pranks, and Super Bowl glories of the team’s many misfits, cast-offs, psychos, and geniuses of the game. Buy The Book

Ballpark

Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream is the story of the building of the Baltimore Orioles’ baseball stadium. I guess it’s best described as the biography of a building – the first “retro” baseball stadium -- and the men and women who conceived and built it: the politicians, the architects, the team officials, the sod farmers, the bricklayers. (If you know where to look, you can see a half-dozen bricks in its façade that aren’t quite in line; I laid them, in a manner of speaking.) Ultimately, this book is the story of the ballplayers, and their fascinating team, and their very proud city. But in the end, strangely enough, the stadium I came to fall in love with was the ballpark that Camden Yards replaced: functional, sparse, entirely loveable Memorial Stadium. Camden Yards is a beautiful edifice, and a great place to watch baseball, but it did not need to be built in a city whose libraries were closing. No other civilization has ever been as quick to abandon – and continue to abandon -- its grand stadia as quickly and thoughtlessly as ours does. But then, no other culture has allowed sports to assume such a skewed position in its society. On the other hand, it’s a hell of a place to watch baseball. And the research allowed me to spend a whole lot of time with Cal Ripken – my idea of an athlete, pure and simple. Buy The Book

Fever

Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee is the only biography of the late, great singer Norma Delores Egstrom of Jamestown, North Dakota. Best known for her renditions of Fever and Is That All There Is?, Lee is widely considered by musicians and musicologists alike to occupy a perch in America’s female pop-music pantheon with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn, although many factors have combined to diminish her historical stature: her lack of productivity in later years, her increasingly diva-like behavior, and her ultimately unclassifiable oeuvre: she sang each and every kind of American music (except country; Peggy refused to sing country). And she sang them all brilliantly. Lee had a particularly difficult upbringing, the daughter of an itinerant, alcoholic railroad man who endured beatings from her stepmother as a young child. She was married four times, once happily: to the guitarist Dave Barbour, whom she met when both were performing with Benny Goodman’s band. From the mid-nineteen forties to the early nineteen sixties, Miss Lee, well, ruled. She died in 2002. In the course of writing and reporting the book over a four-year span, as I interviewed countless remarkable musicians and listened to thousands of extraordinary songs, I was able to take a trip back to an extraordinary era in American history: when popular music spoke for an entire nation. (It sounded pretty good, too. I used to think Trey Anastasio of Phish was our nation’s most gifted instrumentalist ever. Then I listened to Benny Goodman play the clarinet.) Buy The Book

My Father's War

My Father’s War is the story of my late father’s experiences during the Second World War, when he fought on various islands in the South Pacific. He was one of fewer than 100 men to earn two Silver Stars during that conflict. The book is part memoir, part military history and part travelogue. It is chiefly an account of the achievements and sacrifices of the men of the First Marine Division, whose efforts on the island of Guadalcanal turned the tide of the war. In reporting the book, I visited the three islands in the South Pacific on which he fought, and, using maps from the naval archives, was able to retrace his steps through each jungle, and visit the site of each battle. On Guadalcanal I stood on Edson’s Ridge, stood on the sandspit in the mouth of the Matanikau River where he’d been pinned down by machine-gun fire from the opposite bank, and hiked into an overgrown jungle volcano to discover the wreckage of a B-17 with “Esther” painted on its nose. On New Britain I waded into the stream that my father would walk through on unofficial midnight solo missions to get behind Japanese lines. On Peleliu, I explored the caves carved out of coral that had housed the Japanese soldiers, none of whom ever made it off the island. Along the way, I was the recipient of the unbelievable hospitality of the natives of each island, from the little kids who would lead me into the hills to show me the wreckage to the men and women who fed me eel that had been smoked in jungle pits. On Guadalcanal, I entered a dark cinderblock building that now stands on the site of a former battle. Inside were four picnic tables, full of men drinking beer. Under the picnic tables stood pyramids of empty cans. In the center of the room sat a man in a cage, selling the beer. When I entered, the room fell silent; I was met by dozens of glowering frowns. I was not welcome. “My dad fought here,” I said, to no one in particular. One man looked up at me, and said, “First Marine Division?” I nodded. The man broke into a grin, and stood up to let me take his seat, and went to the cage to buy me a beer. But the most extraordinary moments of my research were the days I sat and drank in a ballroom in Las Vegas, at a First Division reunion, with several men who had fought in my father’s company, the G-2-5, on Guadalcanal. They drank mostly in silence. When they spoke, it was to ask each other why they were somehow privileged to still be alive, fifty years after so many of the good young men of their company had lost their lives. Buy The Book

Phil Jackson: The Lord of the Rings

With eleven championship rings to his name, Phil Jackson is internationally recognized as one of the greatest coaches in the history of the NBA. Known as a defensive disrupter and a master fouler during his early days as a New York Knick and later celebrated as the “Zen Master” for his inspirational tactics as a leader, Jackson has had a long and storied career marked by constant self-reflection and reinvention. This is the man who led Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to six championships, Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers to five; who was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame; and who retired in 2011, an official legend—and the most sought-after free-agent coach in history. As befits a legend, Jackson has written several candid, insightful books about his life and career, but now one of America’s most respected sportswriters turns an unvarnished light on Jackson’s strange and remarkable journey, from his sheltered childhood and adolescence in Montana and North Dakota, through his years playing at Madison Square Garden, to his experiences coaching Jordan, Bryant, and more of the greatest players of our time. New York Times-bestselling author Peter Richmond has written a personal, definitive, revealing biography of a veritable sports genius, and an American classic. Buy The Book

The Glory Game

The Glory Game, which I co-wrote with the immortal Frank Gifford, is the story of the 1958 NFL championship game between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts in Yankee Stadium, which the Colts won in overtime. This game is widely viewed to have been the tipping point in the NFL’s evolution from lunchpail league to multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry. As of this writing, the book has been on the New York Times’ bestseller list for four weeks. It’s as much about the time, and the place, and the men, as it is about a football game. And it was a great game; the athletes were smaller, slower and far less athletic than today’s football players, but they hit just as hard as today’s phenomenal weight-room and substance-enhanced physical specimens -- and they played even harder. If you get a chance to watch the game (DVDs are easy to find on the internet, and ESPN’s recent documentary shows most of the highlights) it’s hard not to just caught up in the ebb and flow of the game, in the heroics of Unitas and Lipscomb, Berry and Gifford. But the highlight for me was the Giants’ goal-line stand in the third quarter: not because the Giants held the Colts, but because after the Giant defense had stopped the Colts for the fourth time in a row, the entire Giant team simply got up off the frozen dirt and trotted off the field. No chest-pumps, no fist pumps, no showmanship at all. Make no mistake: I don’t think the game was better back then; the game is much better now. I’m not a guy who thinks the past was somehow more glorious than the present. It wasn’t. But there was a purity to that football game – to the sport as it was played in the Fifties -- that’s hard to miss, and I think that purity is what makes the book worth reading. The final score of the game, by the way, is not in the book. Just a minor omission. Somehow, in our year of interviewing every surviving player, researching every aspect of the game and poring over scrapbooks, letters and videos, we managed to forget to include the final score. For the record, it was 23-17. Also, for the record: the men who played that game that day really were, in Frank’s words, “a band of brothers.” And getting to talk to them all, getting to know each one in some small way, was the privilege of a lifetime. Buy The Book

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