Showing titles in Sports

A bestseller in Japan—a beautiful story about shared self-discovery and friendship involving an unlikely group of students who decide to defy the odds and pursue a seemingly impossible goal together.

I’ve made a lot of dumb mistakes but none dumber than losing her. Senior year. I should be partying and living it up with my friends before graduation, but one more mistake and I’m off the team. Enter Chloe. She comes into my life at a low point, but she becomes the bright spot I reach for every day. She’s the kind of girl who makes a guy want to be a better man. And for a while, I even start to believe I’ve changed enough to deserve her. I’ve got my eye on the future, and I’m letting my past stay where it belongs.

Though nobody has ever identified a single secret - no universally accepted truth - to the sport, every real player searches for one. Travis McKinley is one such seeker. A former professional golfer who feels like he's an amateur at the rest of life, he makes a pilgrimage to the mythical greens at St. Andrews. On the course where golf was born, every link, hole, fairway - even the gorse - feels like sacred ground. Ground that can help an ordinary player, an ordinary man, achieve a higher plane.

Gideon Clarke is a man on a quest. He is out to prove to the world, as his father tried before him, that the world-champion Chicago Cubs traveled to Onamata, Iowa, in the summer of 1908 for an exhibition game against all-stars from the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, an amateur league. The game, which was to be short, pleasant, and the Cubs thought, one-sided, turned into a titanic battle of over 2,000 innings, played mostly in the pouring rain. This game is not on the record books.

It’s been six years without a winning season, and Coach Grant Taylor’s job is on the line. Unless the Shiloh Christian Eagles turn things around - and fast - he’s history. Unfortunately, their leading scorer has just left for a rival school and the team has lost its drive. The pressure is on, and the stakes are high. On the home front, things aren’t much better for Grant. His house is falling apart. His old clunker of a car keeps dying, and the coach and his wife have been unsuccessful in their attempts to start a family.

It’s 1997, and Kathy Murray, desperate to leave her medical sales job and pursue her passion, accepts an offer to teach aerobics in Germany - as a former elite athlete, she’s confident she can handle whatever comes her way. She quickly realizes, though, that her leap of faith may be more challenging than she thought, struggling with the German language and the overt racism she constantly faces as one of the only Black people in her new community. But that doesn’t stop her from taking on her biggest challenge yet: coaching a cheerleading squad of disengaged teenagers.

Set in a lethal pro football league 700 years in the future, THE ROOKIE is a story that combines the intense gridiron action of "Any Given Sunday" with the space opera style of "Star Wars" and the criminal underworld of "The Godfather." Aliens and humans alike play positions based on physiology, creating receivers that jump 25 feet into the air, linemen that bench-press 1,200 pounds, and linebackers that literally want to eat you. Organized crime runs every franchise, games are fixed and rival players are assassinated.

After I’m arrested for throwing a raucous party, my hockey team says I have an image problem. And I need to fix it, stat. Charity work? Check. Haircut? Sure. But I draw the line at hiring my neighbor to style me. In the first place “style” shouldn’t be a verb. And I’m tired of people who’d judge me on appearances. Vera and I don’t see eye to eye on anything. She wants me to try on clothes, while I just want to remove hers. She's distractingly pretty, with soulful eyes and a sinful mouth that likes to argue with me.

A secret descendant of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, Ricky Lenin is a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, fervently committed to overthrowing to the decadent world of British football. As a midfield maestro, he's perfectly placed to infiltrate England's top club, Felchester Rovers, where he proceeds to introduce his radical ideas. But there's more to his fellow players than meets the eye, and Ricky soon discovers he's not the only one seeking to foment revolution.

Missing Links is the story of four middle-class buddies who live outside Boston and play golf together at Ponkaquogue Municipal Golf Links and Deli, not so fondly known as Ponky. An 18-hole garbage dump with hazards that include a concrete river surrounded by a chain-link fence and the pillars of the elevated train that runs through the course, it is reputed to be the worst golf course in America.

When Pope left our hometown my life changed. When he came back and saw his nemesis's ring on my finger, I knew he would be angry, but people change, right? When he found out I had a little girl he demanded I call things off with Kal. He says he refuses to let a man like him raise his child. I told him she wasn't his, but he still won't back down.

As captain for the Boston Blades, I've spent years working toward bringing home the Stanley Cup. But when the owners sell us out to Hollywood, suddenly we're not just playing for thousands of fans, we're cracking open our lives on Getting Pucked, a new reality show. I agree to sign the contract on one condition: They hire New England's reigning queen of media to call the shots. Holly Belliveaux Carter. The woman who drives me to insanity and turns me on with nothing but a quirk of her lips and the sound of her laugh. The only woman I've ever loved. The problem? She's my ex-wife.

My brother warned me. Don’t touch Branch Best. They might be teammates and best friends, but Branch is a heartbreaker. The smirk. The swagger. His playboy reputation is well earned. So obviously, I was drawn to the red flag like a wide receiver to an end zone.

The catastrophe that killed the Pittsburgh Titans changed my entire world. My teammates were more than my friends—they were my brothers. I mourned their loss with the rest of the nation but then I did as I’ve been taught… I moved on. I focused on returning to the ice with the newly rebuilt team and put the tragedy behind me. Considering the circumstances, I adjusted well. Or so I thought. Now I’m plagued by nightmares of the crash and my play has suffered as a result. Facing the possibility of losing my place on the team, I need to pull myself together and fast.

As goalie of the Texas Mutiny, Santos is damn good at protecting that net. But he never bothered to protect his marriage. Letting the fame and notoriety go to his head, he lost the things he loved the most...his wife and kids. Now he has one shot to make it right before losing at this relationship game and he's determined not to miss this time. Mariana has been scarred so deeply by Santos's betrayals, she will carry the wounds forever. After almost ten years of marriage though, she knows him well, and she knows he won't let go without a fight. Still, she refuses to be a push over.

Life changes overnight for coach John Harrison when his high school basketball team and state championship dreams are crushed under the weight of unexpected news. When the largest manufacturing plant shuts down and hundreds of families leave their town, John questions how he and his family will face an uncertain future. After reluctantly agreeing to coach cross-country, John and his wife, Amy, meet an aspiring athlete who’s pushing her limits on a journey toward discovery.

Life is flipped upside down for Cheyenne Haney when her fairytale-like relationship of 5 years suddenly ends the day her boyfriend finally proposes to her. She’s heartbroken and storms out of the apartment seeing nothing but red. She’s so distracted that she doesn’t see the car hurling toward her. Right before the worst outcome could happen, she’s pulled away just in time by a mysterious, yet gorgeous person who introduces themself as Harley.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

I thought he'd always be mine, even when I was forced to say goodbye. We were never meant to let go, but it happened anyway. Two years later, we were exactly where we'd always planned to be. I'd kept my promise. He'd forgotten all about his. Not only had he moved on, but the person he'd moved on with was my best friend, leaving me to begin college with a broken heart. I guess this is the part where I'm supposed to tell you some other guy stepped in and repaired my shattered pieces. This isn't that kind of story. My heart might have been broken, but it refused to fall out of love.

To a jockey, losing his license is the equivalent of being struck off, or disbarred, or cashiered. When steeplechase rider Kelly Hughes lost his license his first feelings were of bewilderment and disbelief, for he was not guilty of the charges. Nor, to the best of his knowledge, was the trainer he had ridden for, who lost his livelihood as well. When his first stunned state of shock subsided, Kelly began to wonder why he had been framed, who had done it, and how it had been achieved.