Outdoors Memoirs

Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 US Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered perhaps the greatest sports moment of the 20th century. Their "Miracle on Ice" has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. It is a legacy of hope, hard work, and homegrown triumph. It is a chronicle of everyday heroes who just wanted to play hockey happily ever after.

Tom Berthel first met Hall of Fame football coach Hayden Fry when, in the mid-1980s, his investment firm, Berthel Fisher & Co., became a corporate sponsor of the University of Iowa Athletic Department. This business partnership not only helped Berthel Fisher establish a winning public image, but it also gave birth to one of the most important and enduring friendships of Tom Berthel’s life.

Written by the late, beloved Dr. George Sheehan, Running and Being tells of the author's midlife return to the world of exercise, play, and competition, in which he found "a world beyond sweat" that proved to be a source of great revelation and personal growth. But Running and Being focuses more on life than it does, specifically, on running. It provides an outline for a lifetime program of fitness and joy, showing how the body helps determine our mental and spiritual energies.

Every spring, Little Leaguers across the country mimic his stance and squabble over the right to wear his number, 2, the next number to be retired by the world’s most famous ball team. Derek Jeter is their hero. He walks in the footsteps of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle, and someday his shadow will loom just as large. Yet he has never been the best player in baseball. In fact, he hasn’t always been the best player on his team. But his intangible grace and Jordanesque ability to play big in the biggest of postseason moments make him the face of the modern Yankee dynasty, and of America’s game.

Through most of the Roaring '20s, Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion of the world. With his fierce good looks and matchless dedication to the kill, he was a fighter perfectly suited to his time. In A Flame of Pure Fire, renowned sports writer Roger Kahn not only chronicles the thrilling, brutal bouts of the Manassa Mauler, but also illustrates how the tumultuous 1920s shaped Dempsey - and how the champ, in turn, left an indelible mark on sports and American history.

Relive the greatest Giants moments through the eyes of the players themselves - newly revised to include Super Bowl XLVI! The New York Giants have long been one of the NFL’s most popular and storied franchises. Now fans of this dynamic football powerhouse will relive all the greatest gridiron moments through the eyes of the players themselves in this newly updated edition of Game of My Life New York Giants.

A true cycling nut would be hard pushed to name all 36 races in just a ‘normal’ UCI World Tour. But there are so many more: 375 on the European Tour alone and many more on the America Tour (80), the Asia Tour (65), and the Africa Tour (45). It’s a year-long schedule, most of it unfamiliar. They may be amazing, they may be odd, but all have their place in the Sticky Bottle calendar. Big races and small ones find a place in Sticky Bottle as well as the relatively unknown. Here are personal and historical tales of cycling wonder and woe, plus a healthy smattering of the bizarre.

From the best-selling author of The Prince of Providence comes a revelatory biography of Rocky Marciano, the greatest heavyweight champion of all time.The son of poor Italian immigrants, with short arms and stubby legs, Rocky Marciano accomplished a feat that eluded legendary heavyweight champions like Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali, and Mike Tyson: He never lost a professional fight. His record was a perfect 49-0.

Lightweight, compact, distinctively styled, and now, electric: The Brompton isn't the only folding bicycle—or even the first. But everyone who has been on one will enthusiastically testify to its marvelous design (virtually unchanged over decades) and the particular joy of riding it. Will Butler-Adams, CEO of Brompton Bicycles, has been at the company for twenty years. Initially, he worked as an engineer for Andrew Ritchie, the bike's brilliant inventor and the business's founder, before taking the helm in 2008.

Beth Mead is one of the world's most talented female footballers - Golden Boot winner and Player of the Tournament at the UEFA Euros 2022, Arsenal Player of the Season 2021-22, and nominee for the 2022 Ballon d'Or. But long before this, Beth was just an ordinary kid from Hinderwell, North Yorkshire who wanted to play football.

Pour la majorité des Canadiens, le nom de la famille Molson fait partie de l’essence même du Canada. Depuis 1786, année où John Molson fonda sa première brasserie à Montréal, il rime avec bière, hockey et philanthropie. Rares sont cependant ceux qui savent à quel point la famille est passée proche, ces dernières années, de perdre le contrôle de cette entreprise.

Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters, demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature.

Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert Macfarlane reveals how the mystery of the world's highest places has come to grip the Western imagination - and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes. His story begins three centuries ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious beasts.

One of WWE's most unlikely champions of all time and also one of its most popular, Bryan has proved to the world and to all of WWE that looks can be deceiving. Just ask anyone who's ever underestimated him . . . right before he went out and whipped the WWE universe into a frenzy. This is Bryan's behind-the-scenes story told for the first time ever by the "YES!" Man himself---from his beginnings as a child wanting to wrestle to his ten years circling the globe on the independent circuit and his remarkable climb to the upper ranks of WWE.

Wayne Bennett is the greatest rugby league coach Australia has ever had. He has won seven premierships and is the greatest man manager the game has known. He is also a living contradiction: Other coaches decry his tactics then attempt to imitate them. Players are desperate to work with him but are left feeling deceived when he cuts them loose. The media disparages him then lavishes him with praise. So who is the real Wayne Bennett? So who is the real Wayne Bennett? Celebrated sports journalist Andrew Webster has been on a mission to find out.

DeRo is the life story of one of the greatest athletes Canada has ever produced. Born and raised in Scarborough, Ontario, Dwayne De Rosario wasn’t expected to make it out of high school, let alone to the top of soccer world. As part of a family of five, growing up in a one-bedroom apartment, he had to work for everything he had and sometimes that meant doing things he realized he didn’t want to do. It was soccer that saved him from a life on the street.

The most inspirational story in Indian cricket is that of Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Generations will remember Dhoni for hitting the spectacular winning six for India in the finals of the 50-over World Cup in 2011 against Sri Lanka, but it is the hope he has given to many aspiring cricketers across this nation that is his true legacy. Born in the lap of poverty and having battled against unimaginable adversities, Dhoni's rise from being just another small-town boy to captain of Team India is a case study in B-schools.

A moving, heartbreaking, and lyrical true story of the author’s escape from an apocalyptic cult—and the survival skills that led to her freedom. My family prepared me for the end of the world, but I know how to survive on what the earth yields. As a child, Michelle Dowd grew up on a...

He was the most vicious, bloodthirsty, reviled villain in the history of the ring. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, he drew record crowds everywhere he went and left a trail of burned and bloody opponents in his wake. But what those legions of fans screaming for his head never knew was that The Sheik was really Eddie Farhat. The son of Arab immigrants, Farhat served his country proudly in World War II and was fulfilling the American dream. When he wasn't screaming unintelligibly and attacking his enemies, he was busy being the owner and operator of World Wide Sports.

Babe Ruth was more than baseball's original superstar. For 85 years, he has remained the sport's reigning titan. He has been named Athlete of the Century...more than once. But who was this large, loud, enigmatic man? In The Big Bam, Leigh Montville brings his trademark touch to this groundbreaking, revelatory portrait of the Babe.