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Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer
Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer.
After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”
Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool . . . and an equally celebrated assortment of pubs. Bloody Confused! will put a smile on the face of any sports fan who has ever questioned what makes us love sports in the first place. .
Price: $8.10
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A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL
Drawing on rare access to an NFL teams players, coaches and facilities, the author of The New York Times bestseller Word Freak trains to become a professional-caliber placekicker As he sharpens his skills, he gains surprising insight into the daunting challengesphysical, psychological, and intellectualthat pro athletes must masterIn Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis infiltrated the insular world of competitive Scrabble® players, ultimately achieving expert status (comparable to a grandmaster ranking in chess). Now he infiltrates a strikingly different subculturepro football. After more than a year spent working out with a strength coach and polishing his craft with a gurulike kicking coach, Fatsis molded his fortyish body into one that could stand upbarelyto the rigors of NFL training. And over three months in 2006, he became a Denver Bronco. He trained with the team and lived with the players. He was given a locker and uniforms emblazoned with #9. He was expected to perform all the drills and regimens required of other kickers. He was unlike his teammates in some waysmost notably, his livelihood was not on the line as theirs was. But he became remarkably like them in many ways: He risked crippling injury just as they did, he endured the hazing that befalls all rookies, he gorged on 4,000 daily calories, he slogged through two-a-day practices in blistering heat. Not since George Plimptons stint as a Detroit Lion more than forty years ago has a writer tunneled so deeply into the NFL. At first, the players tolerated Fatsis, or treated him like a mascot, but over time they began to think of him as one of them. And he began to think like one of them. Like the other Broncoslike all elite athleteshe learned to perfect a motion through thousands of repetitions, to play through pain, to silence the crowds roar, to banish self-doubt. While Fatsis honed his mind and drove his body past exhaustion, he communed with every classic athletic typethe affable alpha male, the overpaid brat, the youthful phenom, the savvy veteranand a welter of bracingly atypical players as well: a fullback who invokes Aristotle, a quarterback who embraces yoga, a tight end who takes creative writing classes in the off-season. Fatsis also witnessed the hidden machinery of a top-flight football franchise, from the God-is-in-the-details strategizing of legendary coach Mike Shanahan to the icy calculation with which the front office makes or breaks careers. With wry candor and hard-won empathy, A Few Seconds of Panic unveils the mind of the modern pro athlete and the workings of a storied sports franchise as no book ever has before..
Price: $12.97
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The Franchise Babe: A Novel
The legendary Dan Jenkins returns with another bawdy, over-the-top novel of hijinks on the links – this time, the LPGA gets the treatment
Jack Brannon, a golf writer in his forties who has been bunkered more than once in the marriage game, covers the sport for the big-time magazine SM. Lately he’s been bored out of his mind writing about the PGA Tour, which he says has become “Tiger and a bunch of slugs playing pushover courses.” So he decides to check out what he calls “the Lolitas,” a new breed of young chicks on the LPGA Tour. Jack chooses as a magazine subject Ginger Clayton, a fiery eighteen-year old with flowing blond locks, legs up to here, and a personality that combines mischief with confidence. With her killer looks and killer game, Ginger looks very much like the kind of star who can take the LPGA to the next level of excitement and acceptance. She is, indeed, The Franchise Babe, and everyone seems to want a part of her.
Jack’s interest in Ginger’s career might have something to do with her mother, Thurlene Clayton, a knockout herself who looks plenty okay in a jacked-up mini-to use Jack’s description of her outfit. As Ginger shows her grit on the ladies’ tour, the greedy hordes looking to benefit from the kid’s talent and personality aren’t the ones who worry Thurlene-and Jack-the most. Someone is trying to knock Ginger out of the competition-permanently.
Jenkins captures the growing buzz around the Franchise Babe and all the insane and hilarious things that happen when the sports world anoints someone new to the throne of super-stardom. Along the way, Jenkins issues bawdy, dead-on takedowns of selfish sports moms, gasbag corporate sponsors, adventurous promoters, sleazy sports agents, point-missing magazine editors, and all the other modern annoyances that make life hard for a guy who, as they say in Texas, is just tryin' to get by without gettin' hurt. .
Price: $10.09
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Rose Bowl Dreams: A Memoir of Faith, Family, and Football
Advance Praise for Rose Bowl Dreams:
"No true football fan should miss Adam Jones' Rose Bowl Dreams. It's more than a football book; it's an inspiring commentary on life itself."
--Winston Groom
"Adam Jones had the good sense to be born into the middle of four generations of a football-lovin' Texas family, and now that I think about it, that's probably redundant. Rose Bowl Dreams reads as if Jones just pulled up a chair, popped open a cold one and started telling stories. He's good company, and you don't have to be able to name the starting lineup of the 2006 Longhorns to enjoy him. Rose Bowl Dreams may not be for Aggies, but the rest of us could learn something about faith, family and football."
--Ivan Maisel, senior writer, ESPN.com, co-author of A War in Dixie
“The best football book since Frederick Exley’s classic A Fan’s Notes. Adam Jones’ Rose Bowl Dreams delves deeply into everything that made this country great—mother, God, football and drinking. Even if you can’t stand any of those things, Rose Bowl Dreams will almost certainly change your mind.”
--Kinky Friedman, author of What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World
"Much like Adam Jones, my parents took me to my first football game at age six. As a result, I never stopped playing the game or writing about it. This is a remarkable story about football and family. It provides a wonderful message about how sports, if handled in the proper context, will forever keep humans together. Rose Bowl Dreams made my spine tingle.'
--Jim Dent, New York Times bestselling author of The Junction Boys and Twelve Mighty Orphans
"Rose Bowl Dreams reveals what lies at the heart of the hardcore college football fan better than any other book I've read. This story of faith and faith rewarded will move all readers, even those who scarcely know the difference between a punt and a pass."
--W. K. Stratton, author of Backyard Brawl: Inside the Blood Feud Between Texas and Texas A&M
God created college football as a grand gift to an imperfect world. I learned this as a very small boy living in the middle of the Texas Panhandle. In time I would come to believe that college football contained all of the joy, faith, pageantry, feeling, failure, and renewal that any person could hope for out of life. It taught me about patience and commitment, about enthusiasm and exasperation, about fatherhood and faith.
Like Norman Maclean’s classic, A River Runs Through It, Rose Bowl Dreams is a memoir that transcends the limits of the sports genre to contemplate faith, love, grief and the challenges of fatherhood.
Rose Bowl Dreams is the story of a family whose passion for college football begins at a small stadium in the remote Texas Panhandle and leads to college football’s most famous venue, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Rose Bowl Dreams develops parallel stories of a son and his mother, a crisis of faith, and three fraught football seasons that end in bittersweet triumph as the author follows the story of the University of Texas Longhorns between the time he discovers his mother has inoperable cancer and Texas triumphs in the National Championship Game over USC in what might well be the greatest college football game ever played.
Along the way Jones lays bare the heart and passionate soul of the college football fan. To millions, college football is the essence of life. It is, yes, religious in intensity. And its impact on families and its greater meaning possesses tremendous resonance. Rose Bowl Dreams reveals the growth and evolution of a college football fan with the humor and poignancy only personal experience could provide: kitchen table conversations with Panhandle football legend “Bulldog” Jones, good-byes to a mother who taught her son about unconditional love and unconditional fandom, the wise counsel of a psychiatrist father, the love of a beautiful woman, raising three boys, Mennonites singing, night games in Lubbock, a scrappy gamer of a quarterback, a man with a golden left arm, and finally, redemptively, a small boy from the south side of Houston named Vince.
He would change everything.
Rose Bowl Dreams is an artfully rendered portrait of a Texas family bound by a game, and an inspiring account of how redemption flows through the contests on the field and into the lives of its fans. It’s a portrait of divine will realized on the college football gridiron. A narrative that is like no football book you’ve ever read, Rose Bowl Dreams reminds us all that the good life moves ever forward. .
Price: $12.47
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The Sportswriter
It's hard to imagine a book illuminating the texture of everyday life more brilliantly, or capturing the truth of human emotions more honestly, than Ford does in his account of an alienated scribe in the New Jersey suburbs. Frank Bascombe, Ford's protagonist, clings to his almost villainous despair in a way that Walker Percy's men don't, but the book is heavily influenced by Ford's fellow southerner nonetheless. Read this and you're ready for Ford's Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel, Independence Day..
Price: $3.97
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The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere--and how baseball helps him find his place in America The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff's mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff's celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it's like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy's outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock 'n' roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball--the inner game as it has never been described before. The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature..
Price: $12.47
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The Boys of Summer
"At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams." Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. What follows only gets better, deeper, more sentimental, and more bittersweet. The team, of course, is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience. It is the rare sports book that cannot be contained by the limitations of its genre; it is equal parts journalism, memoir, social history, and poetry. .
Price: $8.25
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Browns Scrapbook: A Fond Look Back at Five Decades of Football, from a Legendary Cleveland Sportswriter
Veteran sportswriter Chuck Heaton looks back at his 47 years covering the Cleveland Browns--the "Old Browns" teams that fans still miss. Heaton covered the Browns for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1946 to 1993. In these columns, written shortly before his retirement in 1993, Heaton reminisces about Hall of Fame players like Jim Brown, Leroy Kelly, and Bobby Mitchell; original head coach Paul Brown; characters like fabled trainer Murray Kono; even notorious Browns rivals like Oilers' coach Jerry Glanville and Steelers' linebacker Jack Lambert. Browns fans age 40 and older will fondly recall the old days. Younger Browns fans will find out why everyone still longs for them..
Price: $8.70
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