The Best American Sports Writing

By David Maraniss and Glenn Stout

Book Overview

For fans of sports and just plain great writing, this absorbing collection, featuring twenty-eight of the finest pieces from the past year, has something for everyone. Guest editor David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has assembled a fresh crop of the people and stories that dominated the sports world in 2006.

Michael Lewis gives a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary football coach Bill Parcells. Bob Hohler delves in the murky waters of modern amateur basketball, where teams blatantly dole out cash to players and shoe companies set their sights on prospects as young as twelve. William Rhoden traces the fate of an unknown filly injured on the racetrack. Jeff MacGregor describes the unforgettable Friars Club roast of boxing's provocative promoter Don King. Daniel Coyle follows a forty-year-old Slovene soldier who might be the world's best ultra-endurance athlete. L. Jon Wertheim tells of a young pro-basketball player who found himself wrestling the shoe bomber Richard Reid to the ground during a transatlantic flight. And Derek Zumsteg provides a hilarious and utterly original in-depth account of the baseball career of Bugs Bunny, "the greatest banned player ever."

These pieces and many more go beyond the spotlight, revealing the people and issues that make sports so relevant and important to all of us.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618751165
• ISBN13: 9780618751167
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A vast array of quality sports writing

This book takes for you for a loop in that you think that the major sports are going to be covered in baseball, football, basketball and maybe some hockey. The first chapter is actually about racoon hunting and the next one is a satire about Bugs Bunny if he played in an actual baseball game. In fact here is a list of the additional sports covered in this book: -High school "futbol" -High school football -Former NFL player Jake Scott's wherabouts today -Mark McGwire in retirement -The first $100,000 bonus given to a baseball player -Horseracing -Don King & boxing -Olympic skiier Bode Miller -Cycling -A woman race-car driver -Fishing -Surboarding -Bill Parcells -John Cheney -Red Aurbach -Shady HS Basketball sneaker company recruiting -Travel baseball -Former college football star's life after serious injury -Pickup basketball games -Pool -Former college basketball player's encounter with stopping the shoe bomber -Iraqi soccer -Running -Rodeos -Turkey hunting I am giving this book 5 stars to off-set the one-star rating because this book doesn't deserve that low of a rating. Most of the short-stories are from well-respected publications and notable authors. It is hard to read this book straight through because of the variety of the work, but it was a very high quality read.