Sports History

The number one New York Times best-selling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany, the inspiration for the PBS documentary The Boys of '36, broadcast to coincide with the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 80th anniversary of the boys' gold medal race....

Correspondent Christopher Clarey sits down with Federer and those closest to him to tell the story of the greatest player in men's tennis....

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini....

Inverting the Pyramid is a pioneering soccer book that chronicles the evolution of soccer tactics and the lives of the itinerant coaching geniuses who have spread their distinctive styles across the globe....

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200....

Boys Will Be Boys immortalizes the most beloved - and despised - dynasty in NFL history....

For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph over Hitler’s fearsome Silver Arrows during the golden age of auto racing....

This is a sports and business tale of how money, ambition, and 25 years of drama remade an ancient institution into a 21st-century entertainment empire....

New York Times reporter John Branch's riveting, humane pieces about ordinary people doing extraordinary things at the edges of the sporting world have won nearly every major journalism prize. Sidecountry gathers the best of Branch's work....

Renowned novelist and screenwriter Mark Frost turns his eye for golf to an event so famous that it’s grown to the stuff of legend....

Babe Ruth was more than baseball's original superstar....

Hal Mumme spent 14 mostly losing seasons coaching football before inventing a potent passing offense strategy that would revolutionize the game....

ESPN began as an outrageous gamble with a lineup that included Australian Rules Football, rodeo, and a rinky-dinky clip show called Sports Center....

The 1989 Ironman World Championship was the greatest race ever in endurance sports....

The story of the Lakers dynasty from 1996 through 2004, when Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal combined - and collided - to help bring the Lakers three straight championships and restore the franchise as a powerhouse....

The untold and inspiring story of Eric Liddell, hero of Chariots of Fire, from his Olympic medal to his missionary work in China to his last brave years in a Japanese work camp during WWII....

By creating WrestleMania, jumping into the pay-per-view field, and expanding across North America, Vince McMahon changed professional wrestling forever....

Henry Ford, Lee Iaococca and Carroll Shelby concoted a scheme to reinvent the Ford company. They would enter the high-stakes world of European car racing....

Surprisingly, one of sport’s most contentious, complex, and defining clashes played out not in the boxing ring or at the line of scrimmage but on the genteel green fairways of the world’s finest golf courses....

At five feet ten inches tall, running back Walter Payton was not the largest player in the NFL, but he developed a larger-than-life reputation for his strength, speed, and grit....

A compelling, up close and personal portrait of basketball's most inimitable duo and a rollicking ride through professional basketball's best times....

When the Detroit Red Wings were rebooting their franchise after more than two decades of relative futility, they knew the best place to find world-class players who could turn things around more quickly were conscripted servants behind the Iron Curtain....

The Wrestlers' Wrestlers spotlights elite performers and analyzes exactly what made them your favorite wrestler's favorite wrestlers....

The first in-depth look at Lance Armstrong's doping scandal, the phenomenal business success built on the back of fraud, and the greatest conspiracy in the history of sports....

Best-selling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost 300 interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era....

First broadcast in 1948, Sports Report is the longest-running radio sporting programme in the world and one of the BBC’s hardy perennials. Pat Murphy has been a reporter on the programme since 1981 and here he sifts comprehensively through the experiences of his contemporaries and those who made their mark on Sports Report in earlier decades. Drawing on unique access from the BBC Archives Unit, he highlights memorable moments from Sports Report.

Peter Golenbock brings to life baseball greats from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s through timeless stories told straight from the players themselves. Like the enduring classic The Glory of Their Times, this book features the reminiscences of baseball legends, pulled from hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the author.  The players interviewed were All-Stars, Hall of Famers, and heroes to many, and their impact on the national pastime is still seen to this day. Baseball history comes alive, offering a fascinating account of the golden age of baseball.

The series you thought you knew: the first book written with the complete co-operation of the whole team.

The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of partisanship that reveals the pleasures and even the necessities of hatred.

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life. 

From 1976 to 1978, the Cornell men's lacrosse team went on a tear. Winning two national championships and posting an overall record of 42-1, the Big Red, coached by Richie Moran, were the class of the NCAA game. Christian Swezey tells the story of the rise of this dominant lacrosse program. Pulling from interviews with more than ninety former coaches and players from Cornell and its rivals, We Showed Baltimore paints a vivid picture of lacrosse in the 1970s and how Moran and the Big Red helped create the game of today.

Against the backdrop of the call to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, the National Women’s Football League was founded as something of a gimmick. However, their star team, the Toledo Troopers, emerged to challenge traditional gender roles and amass a win-loss record never before or since achieved in American football. The players were housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, former nuns, high school teachers, bartenders, mail carriers, pilots, and would-be drill sergeants. Most of all, they were athletes who had been denied the opportunity to play a game they were born to play.

Two Brothers tells the story of a great sporting family, uncovering new details, exposing myths and placing Jack and Bobby Charlton in their historical context. It's a book about two English footballers but also about English football and England itself.

In his latest book, bestselling author Cass Pennant takes an engaging and unparalleled look at some of the most volatile and violent scenes of fans following their football clubs to have unfolded over the past five decades, and examines the lengths to which many will go to put one over their local rivals. Here is history that also examines everything from the changing face of football violence, to who gets involved—and why. 

In 1999, Manchester United completed a unique Treble, winning the Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League - but more remarkable than that was how they did it and the stories behind the historic achievement. Matt Dickinson covered the whole story at the time and now in 99 compelling chapters brings it all vividly to life. 1999:The Treble and All That reveals the real stories behind the legend that was sealed with a last-minute scrambled goal from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to win the Champions League.