The best books that go beyond the final score

I rushed out to buy Kriegel’s bio of Pistol Pete when it hit stores in 2007.

I’d always found Maravich fascinating as a basketball player—the guy is still the all-time leading scorer in Division I men’s basketball history, and he played just three years of college ball—but didn’t know much about his life.

I wondered: How was there enough material for Kriegel to write a full-length book about him? Turns out, more than enough for Mark to write a brilliant book that, like so many great sports stories, is really about fathers and sons.

One of the books that made me want to write books.

I will never forget the first time I read Hillenbrand’s description of a Tijuana racetrack where jockeys would submerge themselves into giant piles of horse manure, made sauna-like by the blazing sun, to shed weight.

One day, floodwaters from nearby mountain streams crashed through the town and the track, sweeping the piles into “a mighty shit Godzilla.” Every page of Seabiscuit is like that: tactile, with language that reads like a dream.

I have been reading reams of material about and by Jabbar as part of the research for my next book, and this, among his several memoirs, is my favorite.

It is raw and honest and insightful, putting the reader inside the mind and heart of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most consequential athletes. Best of all, Jabbar wrote Giant Steps in the early 1980s, when he was still an elite player for the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers.

It’s difficult to imagine an athlete of his status doing something similar today, in this age of social-media image-burnishing.

After my freshman year of college in 1994, a professor/mentor of mine gave me a copy of this book, enclosing a hand-written note in which he said he felt confident that I would someday end up on a “Pulitzer wall,” just like Bragg had at The New York Times.

I read portions and chapters of this book every year, not only because Bragg writes so beautifully but also because, though he and I come from disparate cultural and geographical backgrounds, there are aspects of his rise through daily journalism that were similar to mine.

One of those similarities: Bragg started out covering high school football. So did I. Still waiting on that Pulitzer, though.

Maraniss is best known for his terrific biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Vince Lombardi; some consider that last one, When Pride Still Mattered, the best sports book ever written.

But Rome 1960, his narrative of the 1960 Summer Olympics, is my favorite. The reason is timing. I read it in 2008 while I was working on my second book. Each morning, I’d consume Maraniss’ smooth prose, which was fortified by the depth of his research.

Each afternoon and evening, inspired, I’d write some of my book, trying my damnedest to equal him, always falling short, of course, but thrilled in the attempt.