Sports

The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport

Ever wonder how to retrieve a sunken golf cart from a snake-infested lake? Or which club in your bag is best suited for combat against a horde of rats? If these and other sporting questions are gnawing at you, The Downhill Lie, Carl Hiaasen’s hilarious confessional about returning to the fairways after a thirty-two-year absence, is definitely the book for you.

Originally drawn to the game by his father, Carl wisely quit golfing in 1973, when “Richard Nixon was hunkered down like a meth-crazed badger in the White House, Hank Aaron was one dinger shy of Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, and The Who had just released Quadrophenia.” But some ambitions refuse to die, and as the years—and memories of shanked 7-irons—faded, it dawned on Carl that there might be one thing in life he could do better in middle age than he could as a youth. So gradually he ventured back to the dreaded driving range, this time as the father of a five-year-old son—and also as a grandfather.

“What possesses a man to return in midlife to a game at which he’d never excelled in his prime, and which in fact had dealt him mostly failure, angst and exasperation? Here’s why I did it: I’m one sick bastard.”

And thus we have Carl’s foray into a world of baffling titanium technology, high-priced golf gurus, bizarre infomercial gimmicks and the mind-bending phenomenon of Tiger Woods; a maddening universe of hooks and slices where Carl ultimately—and foolishly—agrees to compete in a country-club tournament against players who can actually hit the ball. “That’s the secret of the sport’s infernal seduction,” he writes. “It surrenders just enough good shots to let you talk yourself out of quitting.”

Hiaasen’s chronicle of his shaky return to this bedeviling pastime and the ensuing demolition of his self-esteem—culminating with the savage 45-hole tournament—will have you rolling with laughter. Yet the bittersweet memories of playing with his own father and the glow he feels when watching his own young son belt the ball down the fairway will also touch your heart. Forget Tiger, Phil and Ernie. If you want to understand the true lure of golf, turn to Carl Hiaasen, who has written an extraordinary book for the ordinary hacker.

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 team’s 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 challenges—physical, psychological, and intellectual—that pro athletes must master

In 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 subculture—pro 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 up—barely—to 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 ways—most 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 Plimpton’s 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 Broncos—like all elite athletes—he learned to perfect a motion through thousands of repetitions, to play through pain, to silence the crowd’s roar, to banish self-doubt.

While Fatsis honed his mind and drove his body past exhaustion, he communed with every classic athletic type—the affable alpha male, the overpaid brat, the youthful phenom, the savvy veteran—and 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.

Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

My Life on the Run: The Wit, Wisdom, and Insights of a Road Racing Icon

Harvey Penick's Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf

Before titanium drivers, before oversized heads and bubble shafts, before electronic systems to tell you how far you are from the pin, golf was much the same game it is today. The lessons Harvey Penick taught in the pre-gadget days still stand. The golf swing is basically the same, and Penick could teach it better than anybody. For most of his life, he never intended to publish his Little Red Book, a notebook of golf wisdom and anecdotes that he compiled with the idea that he'd pass it on to his son. But, for the sake of history, it's a good thing that he changed his mind. Contained in its 175 pages is just about all you need to know about golf from a technical standpoint, along with Penick's priceless memories of working with famous pros, teaching absolute nobodies to get the ball in the air, and finding a horde of bat guano and hauling it across town in a pickup truck to fertilize his golf course. This book makes you feel good about playing golf, that you're part of something steeped in ritual and mystery and tradition, and that the game was played perfectly well before perimeter-weighted, graphite-shafted irons came along.

THE CLASSIC BOOK OF GOLF WISDOM FROM THE GAME'S GREATEST TEACHER

The Little Red Book has become required reading for all players and fans of the game of golf, from beginners to seasoned pros. The legendary Harvey Penick, who began his golfing career as a caddie in Austria, Texas, at the age of eight, worked with an amazing array of champions over the course of nearly a century, dispensing invaluable wisdom to golfers of every level. Penick simplifies the technical jargon of other instructional books and communicates the very essence of the game, and his Little Red Book is full of inspiration and homespun wisdom that reflects at once his great love of golf as well as his great talent for teaching.

Encylopedia of Immaturity (Klutz)

How to never grow up, the complete guide.

Roadie: The Misunderstood World of a Bike Racer

Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else

The latest and greatest in ESPN.com baseball guru Rob Neyer's
Big Book series, Legends is a highly entertaining guide to baseball fables that
have been handed down through generations.

The well-told baseball story has long been a staple for baseball fans. In Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends, Neyer breathes new life into both classic and obscure stories throughout twentieth-century baseball -- stories that, while engaging on their own, also tell us fascinating things about their main characters and about the sport's incredibly rich history. With his signature style, Rob gets to the heart of every anecdote, working through the particulars with careful research drawn from a variety of primary sources. For each story, he asks: Did this really happen? Did it happen, sort of? Or was the story simply the wild invention of someone's imagination? Among the scores of legends Neyer questions and investigates...

• Did an errant Bob Feller pitch really destroy the career of a National League All-Star?
• Did Greg Maddux mean to give up a long blast to Jeff Bagwell?
• Was Fred Lynn the clutch player he thinks he was?
• Did Tommy Lasorda have a direct line to God?
• Did Negro Leaguer Gene Benson really knock Indians second baseman Johnny Berardino out of baseball and into General Hospital?
• Did Billy Martin really outplay Jackie Robinson every time they met?
• Oh, and what about Babe Ruth's "Called Shot"?

Rob checks each story, separates the truths from the myths, and places their fascinating characters into the larger historical context. Filled with insider lore and Neyer's sharp wit and insights, this is an exciting addition to a superb series and an essential read for true fans of our national pastime.

Bobke II: The Continuing Misadventures of Bob Roll

An Incomplete and Inaccurate History of Sport: . . . and Other Random Thoughts from Childhood to Fatherhood

Painstakingly faithful to its title, Kenny Mayne’s book is neither complete nor is it particularly accurate. Ostensibly an A-to-Z encyclopedia of all known sports, many sports are never mentioned. There’s not a word about rugby, volleyball, Roller Derby, swimming, or (shockingly) Basque pelota or shinty. There is a chapter about sliding, but none about skiing. Competitive eating and rhythmic gymnastics will have to wait for another book. However, there are roughly eight chapters about tackle football–“the greatest sport in the world, and everyone knows it”–and a good four or five about horse racing, so quit complaining before you’ve even read the book. There will be plenty of time for complaining after you’ve finished it (about an hour from now–tops).

Those sports that are covered in the book are examined with exhaustive inattention to unretained detail. Many chapters have nothing to do with sport. For instance, the chapter on hunting is about hunting for a hassle-free triple tall Americano light on the water.

So, then, what exactly is this book-like thing you hold in your hands? Part nostalgic memoir (like the summer Mark Sansaver hit 843 home runs in backyard Wiffle ball), part Dave Barry—esque riffs (like explaining bocce to non-Italians), part scholarly tract (includes the origins of tackle football), and part metafiction (see “Time-outs”). . . all with illustrations drawn by Kenny’s daughters, it is what Kenny calls his anti coffee-table book, or Coaster. The publisher calls it $24.95. Reviewers like Michiko Kakutani may call it “insipid,” but because Kenny has included a revolutionary “backwords” following the book’s foreword, she’ll have to call it an “insipid breakthrough” of a book.

So what is this book-like thing? Like the great mysteries in life, you’ll have to decide for yourself.


*That would include a thought I just had. This thought had something to do with Wiffle ball. What a great chapter. But that’s not to say the chapter on hunting is terrible even though it’s mostly about coffee. Plus I wrote stuff about my children. There’s even a chapter on jai alai. This book has both still photographs and still illustrations. It doesn’t have any moving pictures. That would have required the inclusion of a projector and a big white screen in the book, and I’m trying to take a stand on energy conservation. Strangely enough, Ken Griffey Jr. asked me if the book would have video. This will make sense when you read the chapter on him.

I wish I'd written about the Seattle Pilots. I used to go to their games when I was nine. My favorite player was Tommy Harper.  But this isn't just a sports book. It covers all sorts of things. I hope they place it in the Miscellaneous section. That should draw a lot of attention.  I was told that the presence of a sub-title would sell more books. How am I doing with you? Make sure to tell people about this alluring and informative sub-title. This sub-title is longer than some of my chapters.