Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Audio" in Sports & Outdoors

Throughout history humans have been challenging themselves against each other. Who could be the fastest? The strongest? The cleverest? While this was going on some other people decided to create epic contests that were… well, a little bit more unusual. Welcome to the extraordinary world of competitions, introduced by podcaster and expert fact-finder Anna Goldfield!

Marcus Rashford MBE is famous worldwide for his skills both on and off the soccer field—but before he was a Manchester United and England soccer player, and long before he started his inspiring campaign to end child food poverty, he was just a kid from Wythenshawe, South Manchester. Written with journalist Carl Anka, You Are a Champion is packed full of stories from Marcus’s own life, brilliant advice and top tips from performance psychologist Katie Warriner. It will show you how to be the very BEST that you can be.

Playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Glenn Burke could do it all—hit, throw, run, field. He was the heart of the clubhouse who energized his teammates with his enthusiasm and love for the game. It was that energy that led Glenn to invent the high five one October day back in 1977—a spontaneous gesture after a home run that has since evolved into our universal celebratory greeting. But despite creating this joyful symbol, Glenn Burke, a gay Black man, wasn’t always given support and shown acceptance in return.

Growing up, young Chris Paul dreamed of playing professional basketball. But he knew it would take more than dedication and practice, so Chris looked to his grandfather Papa Chilly as a shining example of the values he could apply both in basketball and in life. Papa taught him about respect, faith, kindness, generosity, and the determination to succeed, just as Papa had succeeded as the first Black business owner of a service station in North Carolina.

According to Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson was “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.” According to Hank Aaron, Robinson was a leader of the Black Power movement before there was a Black Power movement. According to his wife, Rachel Robinson, he was always Jack, not Jackie—the diminutive form of his name bestowed on him in college by white sports writers. And throughout his whole life, Jack Robinson was a fighter for justice, an advocate for equality, and an inspiration beyond just baseball.

Attucks! is the true story of the all-black high school basketball team that broke the color barrier in segregated 1950s Indiana, masterfully told by National Book Award-winner Phil Hoose. Anchored by the astonishing Oscar Robertson, a future college and NBA star, the Crispus Attucks Tigers went down in history as the first state champions from Indianapolis and the first all-black team in US history to win a racially open championship tournament - an integration they had forced with their on-court prowess.