For 20 years, I tried to write politically relevant, “important” novels. I teach. One day I told my students that to succeed as a writer, they needed to write about things they knew and loved. Honesty was the key. That night, I resumed work on a novel set in Prague involving Cold War intrigue, capitalism, communism, and some other "isms" I’ve forgotten. I wrote a paragraph and then stopped. My advice was good. Write about things you know and love. So why not follow it myself? What section of the newspaper did I read first? The sports page. Did I live and die with my favorite sports teams? Yes. I put my hopeless Prague novel aside and started On the Devil’s Court. For better or worse, a sportswriter is who I am.
Frey follows four Coney Island high school basketball stars (including Stephon Marbury) as they attempt to navigate through the gangs, drugs, and violence of the housing projects in order to wrap their hands around the Holy Grail--a D-1 basketball scholarship. Pressure--athletic and academic--is constant. NCAA coaches size them up the way judges examine livestock at a 4-H show. What’s your scoring average? Rebounds? Assists? GPA? SAT score? What can you do for me? Lurking in the background are more fundamental questions: How can neighborhoods like this be healed? How can these young men be healed? The book is twenty years old and reads as if it were written yesterday.
Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four young men as they navigate the NCAA recruitment process, their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair.
It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that. In The Last Shot, the aspirations of a few of the neighborhood's most promising players reveal that what they have going for them (athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication) may not be enough to defeat what's working against them: woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the…
Jersey City hoops this time, but Wojnarowski’s book details the dedication of Bob Hurley (father of Duke star and NBA player Bobby Hurley) who is the head coach at a small Catholic school in Jersey City. Under his leadership, this tiny school wins championship after championship. For Hurley, the championships are a sidebar. His focus is on the players as human beings. He knows them--where they came from, where they are, where they could be headed--good and bad. Tough love at its best. A remarkable book about a remarkable man. The flip side of The Last Shot.
In a city mired in endless decay, where the youth suffer through all the horrors of urban blight, hope comes in a most unassuming form: a tiny brick schoolhouse run by two Felician nuns where a singular basketball genius takes teenagers from the mean streets of Jersey City and turns them into champions on the hardcourt. Coach Bob Hurley had been working miracles at St. Anthony High School for over thirty years, winning state and national championships and offering his players rescue from their surroundings through college scholarships, when he met his most dysfunctional team yet. In The Miracle of…
I love baseball, but I get tired of the overblown Baseball is poetry or Baseball is America tugs at the heart. Hey, people, it’s a game. Ritter’s book weaves together interviews with players to bring to life the early days of baseball. Fans were tough; travel was hard; pay was low; expectations were high, off-season jobs were mandatory, but these men loved to pitch and hit and catch, and they loved the camaraderie, so it was worth it. Mostly. Cast of characters? Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Fred Snodgrass, Chief Bender, and on it goes. Hearing these greats from the past describe the game they played in their own words is thrilling, and Ritter’s narrative flows like water. Love baseball? Love history? Love the sound of those old-timers' names? Don’t miss this one.
“Easily the best baseball book ever produced by anyone.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This was the best baseball book published in 1966, it is the best baseball book of its kind now, and, if it is reissued in 10 years, it will be the best baseball book.” — People
From Lawrence Ritter (The Image of Their Greatness, The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time), comes one of the bestselling, most acclaimed sports books of all time, The Glory of Their Times—now a Harper Perennial Modern Classic.
Baseball was different in earlier days—tougher, more raw, more intimate—when giants like Babe Ruth…
Okay, two books--but they’re really one. The Southpaw is
about Henry
Wiggen the baseball player finding his way in the major leagues. A sports book by and large. And then the fastball to the heart--Bang the Drum
Slowly. The vagaries and tragedies of life intrude on the pristine
baseball field, and Wiggen and the rest have to deal with reality: boys
grow into men; men sicken, men die. These books inspired me when I
decided to become a writer of sports novels. They showed me that not only
could I write a sports book about more than sports, but also that I needed to write
a sports book about more than sports. Why bother otherwise?
Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball "with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family." More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly is about the friendship and the lives of a group of men as they each learn that a teammate is dying of cancer. Bang the Drum Slowly was chosen as one of the top one hundred sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and appears on numerous other…
When I was a boy, I’d get up early, go outside to retrieve the SF Chronicle, and look at the headline of the sports page. If the Giants had lost, I’d put the rubber band back around the newspaper and leave it on the lawn to rot. If they’d won, I’d bring it in and devour the recap and the box score.
This old-fashioned, hero-worship book works because Willie Mays is an old-fashioned hero. Great baseball player, great teammate, great showman, fascinating life. Birmingham to New York to San Francisco. Joy in playing the game at every stop. A wonderful pick-me-up of a book with great photos, great stories, and the greatest player of all time smack dab in the middle of it all. Say Hey!
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BESTSELLER
The legendary Willie Mays shares the inspirations and influences responsible for guiding him on and off the field in this reflective and inspirational memoir.
"Even if, like me, you thought you had pretty much read and heard all there was to read and hear about Willie Mays, this warmhearted book will inform and reward you. And besides, what true baseball fan can ever get enough of Willie Mays? Say Hey! Read on and enjoy." -From the Foreword by Bob Costas
"It's because of giants like Willie that someone like…
High school baseball pitcher Laz Weathers has a golden arm. He just needs a major league scout to see it. But when you live in a trailer home and go to a struggling school with a lousy athletic program, how do you do that? Laz’s big break comes when the local high school baseball powerhouse gives him the opportunity to escape his dead-end by moving in with one of their families and thus becoming eligible to join their high-profile team. Great coaching. Scouts at every game. State title is a distinct possibility.
But escape also means leaving home, family, friends, obligations. Is the shiny future worth it if you have to close the door to your past?
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
