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Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America
by Will Bardenwerper
A poignant memoir exploring small town baseball as a lens into what's right and wrong with modern America - written by an acclaimed journalist who went from Princeton to Army Ranger School to Iraq in search of the core values he ended up finding in a minor league stadium in Batavia, New York--
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Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL Into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut
by Ken Belson
On February 11, 2024, NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, & the league's two most powerful owners, Jerry Jones & Robert Kraft, looked down at the spectacle before them. What they saw was the sport's championship game, the Super Bowl-now a de facto national holiday-being played in a shiny new $2B stadium, home to the first franchise based in Las Vegas, after the league's embrace of nationwide gambling. The moment was over 30 years in the making. We're not competing with the NBA or MLB, Goodell later quipped in private. Our competitors are Apple & Google. In Every Day is Sunday, veteran New York Times Business & NFL reporter, Ken Belson, traces the evolution of the league from one of the four US professional sports, into the cultural & economic juggernaut it is today. Belson illustrates how the league's rise coincided with the arrival of Jones & Kraft in the early 90's. He provides an inside look on how these two men reshaped the league, taking readers into the secretive owner's meeting, how they decided Goodell was the right man to place as Commissioner, and how the three built, wielded, and held on to their collective power-- Provided by publisher.
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On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports
by Christine Brennan
America has never seen an athlete quite like Caitlin Clark. Attracting record-shattering attendance and TV ratings, she has riveted the nation with her famous logo threes and thrilling passes and changed how fans across the country view women's sports. Drawing on dozens of extensive interviews and exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting, veteran journalist Christine Brennan narrates Clark's rise--including the formative experiences that led to her scoring more points than any woman or man in major college basketball history. ... Clark arrived as a sports and cultural icon a little more than fifty years after the passage of Title IX, the 1972 law that opened the floodgates for girls and women to play sports in America. On Her Game is a sports story, certainly, but it's also the story of a nation falling in love with what it has created because of that law--millions of new athletes, led by the magical Caitlin Clark--
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Iron in the Blood: How the Alabama vs. Auburn Rivalry Shaped the Soul of the South
by Jay Busbee
Yahoo! Sports senior writer Jay Busbee traces the perpetual impact of football in Alabama, from the days of Reconstruction all the way to the hyper partisan battles of 2020 and beyond. From the Kick Six to the poisoned oaks at Toomer's Corners, Iron in the Blood revels in the victories of both schools and examines the iconic figures connected with both programs, as well as their unprecedented impact on football and social justice alike, all while paying homage to the beating heart of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry: the dedicated fanbase-- Provided by publisher.
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Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson
by Mark Kriegel
Long before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Mike Tyson was HBO's leading man. It was the greatest sales job in the sport's history, and the most lucrative. But the business of Tyson concealed truths that were darker and more nuanced than the script would allow. The intervening decades have seen Tyson villainized, lionized, and fetishized--but never, until now, fully humanized. Mark Kriegel ... was a young cityside reporter at the New York Daily News when first swept up in the Tyson media hurricane, but here measures his subject not by whom he knocked out, but by what he survived. Though Tyson was billed as a modern-day Jack Dempsey, the truth was closer to Sonny Liston. Tyson was Black, feared, and born to die young. What made Liston a pariah, though, would make Tyson--in a way his own handlers could never understand--a touchstone for a generation raised on a soundtrack of hip hop and gunfire--
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Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It
by Jane Leavy
A New York Times bestselling biographer and lifelong baseball devotee takes readers on an epic journey through the game that baseball has become-- a heartfelt manifesto that's perfect for lovers of the sport. Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture? Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions. What Leavy uncovers is not only what's wrong with baseball--and how to fix it--but also what's right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.
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Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis
by Giri Nathan
NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY * THE NEW YORKER * NPR * TOWN & COUNTRY * The story of Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, and their epic rivalry, as told by the best tennis writer in America (Brian Phillips, The Ringer). For more than two decades, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer dominated men's tennis so thoroughly that it became difficult to imagine how the game would keep its shine once they retired. Then came 2024--the first year since 2002 that none of them won a Grand Slam tournament--and a technicolor future was revealed. The major titles were divided between a pair of prodigies in their early twenties: the effervescent showman Carlos Alcaraz, whose infinite variety of shots won him the French Open and Wimbledon; and the relentlessly cool Jannik Sinner, whose power and precision secured him the Australian Open and US Open even amid a doping controversy. Though other young contenders jostled for the spotlight, and Djokovic tried to hold his ground, the transcendentally gifted Alcaraz and Sinner just kept installing their new regime.
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Why We Love Football: A History in 100 Moments
by Joe Posnanski
This is a deep dive into the archives and legends of the sport, and the result is a rousing tale of the 100 greatest moments in football lore. ... From hidden gems and classic tales to famous moments told from previously unheard perspectives, this book is the football book for even its most ardent fans. [Includes such moments as] Patrick Mahomes's magic to the Ice Bowl, ... Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass, [and] a plethora of football 'miracles'--
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American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback
by Seth Wickersham
Pull back the curtain on the most powerful position in all of sports: the Quarterback, the American equivalent of royalty, long glamorized, mythologized and worshiped. The New York Times bestselling author of It's Better to be Feared examines football's QB lifecycle: high school, college, the NFL, retirement-and all that comes with it--
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The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup
by Jonathan Wilson
A definitive new history of the world's most watched sporting event--just in time for the 2026 tournament Wilson is the game's pre-eminent popular historian.--Observer (UK) An Irish Times Best Sports Book of the Year Since 1930, the World Cup has become a truly global obsession. It is the most watched sporting event on the planet, and 211 teams competed to make it into the 2022 tournament. From its inception, it has also been a vehicle for far more than soccer. A tool for self-mythologizing and influence-peddling, The World Cup has played a crucial role in nation-building, and continues to, as countries negotiate their positions in a globalized world. The Power and the Glory is a comprehensive history of the matches and goals, the tales of scandal and triumph, the haggling and skulduggery of the bidding process, and the political and cultural tides behind every tournament. Jonathan Wilson details not merely what happened but why, based on fresh interviews and meticulous research. The book is as much about the legends of the sport, from Pel to Messi, as it is about the nations that made them, from Mussolini's Italy to partitioned Germany to controversy-ridden Qatar. Brimming with politics, heart, and drama, on and off the pitch, The Power and the Glory is the definitive story of the greatest cultural event of our time.
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