Showing titles in History of Sports

Journeying from Abu Dhabi to Newcastle, and onto London, Paris, Moscow and New York in search of the answers, Miguel Delaney follows the threads that surround the allegations of sportswashing and misconduct in the beautiful game. The result is an exploration of how European football clubs have been bought by some of the world's wealthiest businessmen and state-backed corporations. Drawing on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to key stakeholders, Miguel has produced an all-encompassing exposé of modern footballs highest echelons.

Tasked with finding common ground and building friendships between the world's two largest countries and arctic neighbors, a young Canadian diplomat finds himself on his first overseas assignment in Moscow, the Soviet capital. It's the early 1970s and a Cold War between communism and capitalism, the west and the east, is simmering-while the ice rink is just starting to heat up. Smith opts for sports diplomacy, throwing off his embassy black tie dress codes and donning the blue and white sweater of the Moscow Maple Leafs.

Named one of Financial Times’s Best Books of 2025 The inside story of the crisis within the country’s most classic sport—horseracing—and why money is killing thoroughbreds at the top of their game. Every year, hundreds of horses die on the racetrack. Why? In this deeply reported and...

How Michael Jordan’s path to greatness was shaped by race, politics, and the consequences of fame To become the most revered basketball player in America, it wasn’t enough for Michael Jordan to merely excel on the court. He also had to become something he never intended: a hero...

In this highly entertaining and insightful memoir, one of television’s most respected broadcasters interweaves the story of his life and career with lively firsthand tales of some of the most thrilling events and fascinating figures in modern sports. No sportscaster has covered more major...

Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they're everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through sunless winters in polar research stations and in the sweltering summer heat of Tanzanian villages and streamed live over Twitch to millions of viewers. And they're extraordinary for precisely the same reason: they're everywhere, in every civilization, everywhere in the world across all recorded human history. In Across the Board, tabletop game aficionado Tim Clare takes us through that history and across those civilizations.

Endzone tells the story of how college football's most successful and respected program nearly lost it all in less than a decade and entirely of its own doing. It is a story of hubris, greed, and betrayal, a tale more suited to Wall Street than the world's top public university.

Is there a sports team more synonymous with winning than the New York Yankees? The team of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, Ford, Mantle, Jackson, Mattingly? Of Torre, Jeter, and Rivera? Of forty American League pennants, twenty-seven World Championships, and nearly forty Hall of Famers? Like so many great American institutions, the Yankees began humbly, on the muddy, uneven grass of Hilltop Park. Eighteen years later the little second-class franchise won its first pennant. Today, the Yankees are worth more than a billion dollars.

In the autumn of 2020 Ned Boulting (ITV head cycling commentator and Tour de France obsessive) bought a length of Pathé news film from a London auction house. All he knew was it was film from the Tour de France, a long time ago. Once restored it became clear it was a short sequence of shots from stage 4 of the 1923 Tour de France. No longer than 2.5 minutes long, it featured half a dozen sequences, including a lone rider crossing a bridge. Ned set about learning everything he could about the sequence – studying each frame, face and building – until he had squeezed the meaning from it.

The 1989 Ironman World Championship was the greatest race ever in endurance sports. In a spectacular duel that became known as the Iron War, the world's two strongest athletes raced side by side at world-record pace for a grueling 139 miles. Driven by one of the fiercest rivalries in triathlon, Dave Scott and Mark Allen raced shoulder to shoulder through Ironman’s 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike race, and 26.2-mile marathon. After 8 punishing hours, both men would demolish the previous record - and cross the finish line a mere 58 seconds apart.

Comprised of exclusive interviews with Jets players, coaches, and other figures surrounding the organization, Sack Exchange: The Definitive Oral History of the 1980s New York Jets is an eye-opening account of a memorable era in one team's history, which also takes a step back and looks at the state of the National Football League as a whole during the 1980s.

Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did something no NFL team had ever done before and that none will ever likely do again: They lost 26 games in a row. It started in 1976, in their first season as an expansion team, and it lasted until the penultimate game of the 1977 season, when they defeated Archie Manning and the New Orleans Saints on the road. It was the beginning of a new streak for a team that had come to be called "The Yucks".

Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports -- told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.

He was The Kid. The Splendid Splinter. Teddy Ballgame. One of the greatest figures of his generation, and arguably the greatest baseball hitter of all time. But what made Ted Williams a legend – and a lightning rod for controversy in life and in death? What motivated him to interrupt his Hall...

Legendary sportswriter Red Smith characterized Ben Hogan’s comeback from a near-fatal automobile crash in February 1949 as “the most remarkable feat in the history of sports.” Now, more than 60 years later, that statement still rings true. The crowning moment of Hogan’s comeback was his astonishing victory in the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club near Philadelphia, where his battered legs could barely carry him on the 36-hole final day.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Kirkus Reviews Most Anticipated Book of the Fall A moving celebration of the history of American football from the New York Times bestselling author of Why We Love Baseball After his bestselling home run books Why We Love Baseball and The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski...

Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling is a history of professional wrestling’s formative period in the U.S., from roughly 1874 to 1941, and the contested interplay of wrestlers and promoters who built the “sport” as we know it. During this period, the major conventions that would define wrestling to the present day were perfected and codified, as wrestling morphed from a rough sport practiced on farms and at town gatherings to melodramatic mass entertainment that reliably drew large crowds in cities across the nation.

How Dabo Swinney used his energy, faith, and determination to turn the Clemson Tigers into a football powerhouse...

With a Foreword by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe Available once again for a new generation, the first volume in Arthur Ashe’s epic trilogy that chronicles the remarkable legacy of Black athletes in the United States—a major addition to our understanding of American history and the fulfillment of...

When British soldiers began settling in early Canada, their sporting traditions blended with a Mi’kmaq game to create a new sport that evolved into hockey. A History of Hockey in Canada traces hockey’s roots from those first steps on the frozen ponds of eastern Canada to the modern game we know and love.