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As I write in Fight Songs, my name has nothing to do with it: It refers to a geography an ocean away, and predates any notion of the American South (or of America, for that matter). I have spent most of my life in the South, though, loving football, basketball, and other sports that didn’t always love me back. I became curious about why they’ve come to play such an outsized role in our culture. Why did my home state come to a standstill for a basketball tournament? Why does my wife’s home state shut down for a football game? Writing Fight Songs was one way of exploring those questions. Reading these books was another.
Warren St. John spent a season with the University of Alabama fans who drive their RVs to every single Crimson Tide game, chronicling the lengths and depths of their obsessive fandom, the ways they build community and identity out of a bunch of kids playing a kids’ game... and this was before the Crimson Tide won six national championships in the last 15 years.
As I often tell my wife, an Alabama fan born and raised, “You people are insane.” Lucky for me I find their insanity captivating.
What is it about sports that turns otherwise sane people into raving lunatics? Why does winning compel people to tear down goal posts, and losing, to drown themselves in bad keg beer? In short, why do fans care?
In search of answers, Warren St. John seeks out the roving community of RVers who follow the Alabama Crimson Tide from game to game. A movable feast of Weber grills and Igloo coolers, these are hard-core football fans who arrive on Wednesday for Saturday’s game: The Reeses, who skipped their own daughter’s wedding because it coincided with a Bama game; Ray Pradat,…
As I write in Fight Songs, my name has nothing to do with it: It refers to a geography an ocean away, and predates any notion of the American South (or of America, for that matter). I have spent most of my life in the South, though, loving football, basketball, and other sports that didn’t always love me back. I became curious about why they’ve come to play such an outsized role in our culture. Why did my home state come to a standstill for a basketball tournament? Why does my wife’s home state shut down for a football game? Writing Fight Songs was one way of exploring those questions. Reading these books was another.
If you’re a North Carolinian of a certain age and background, reading To Hate Like This is like looking into one of those magnifying mirrors: You’ll see yourself, but with every pore and blemish blown up to comic proportions.
If you’re not a North Carolinian of that age and background, you’ll learn much about why we are the way we are. Though ostensibly about the fierce basketball rivalry between the University of North Carolina and Duke, it’s really about the pulls (and repulsions) of home, of family, of history, of language.
Even if you don’t like basketball, even if you hate both Carolina and Duke as much as I do, if you’ve ever felt deep ambivalence about your place of birth, you’ll love this book.
An obsessively personal history of the blood feud between North Carolina’s and Duke’s basketball teams and what that rivalry says about class and culture in the South
The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of…
As I write in Fight Songs, my name has nothing to do with it: It refers to a geography an ocean away, and predates any notion of the American South (or of America, for that matter). I have spent most of my life in the South, though, loving football, basketball, and other sports that didn’t always love me back. I became curious about why they’ve come to play such an outsized role in our culture. Why did my home state come to a standstill for a basketball tournament? Why does my wife’s home state shut down for a football game? Writing Fight Songs was one way of exploring those questions. Reading these books was another.
The book that started it all (for me, at least): I read this book just before the 2007 season, when my beloved Wake Forest Demon Deacons were the reigning conference champs, when Alabama was about to start the Nick Saban Era.
It was a fall of unusual hope after a summer of deaths and distances. From The Last Coach I not only learned a lot about the legendary Bear Bryant, and about America in the American Century, but also felt like I got a pep talk from Bryant himself.
Soon after I finished reading this I met a beautiful woman. When I learned she was an Alabama fan I told her I’d just read this and asked if she had. She told me to check the dedication page: The author’s her uncle.
The explosive biography of the greatest college football coach in history.
When Paul William "Bear" Bryant died on January 26, 1983, it was the lead story on the all three networks' evening news. New York City newspapers reported his death on their front pages. ("Crimson Tears," read the headline in the New York Post, "Nation weeps over death of legendary Bear Bryant, 69.") Three days later, America watched in awe as an estimated quarter of a million mourners lined the fifty-five mile stretch from Tuscaloosa to a Birmingham cemetery to pay their respects as his three-mile long funeral cortege drove…
As I write in Fight Songs, my name has nothing to do with it: It refers to a geography an ocean away, and predates any notion of the American South (or of America, for that matter). I have spent most of my life in the South, though, loving football, basketball, and other sports that didn’t always love me back. I became curious about why they’ve come to play such an outsized role in our culture. Why did my home state come to a standstill for a basketball tournament? Why does my wife’s home state shut down for a football game? Writing Fight Songs was one way of exploring those questions. Reading these books was another.
What does this book have to do with sports? Nothing.
What does it have to do with identity and community, and how the one pushes and pulls, rips and welds the other into form? With how histories can turn into hauntings and our fondest hopes into demons? Everything.
Randall Kenan died while I was finishing my book and I still haven’t really gotten over it. I’m always going to miss the words he never got to write, even as I cherish those he did.
Horace Cross, the 16-year-old descendent of slaves and deacons of the church, spends a horror-filled spring night wrestling with the demons and angels of his brief life. Brilliant, popular, and the bright promise of his elders, Horace struggles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of Tim's Creek. His cousin, the Reverend James Greene, tries to help Horace but finds he is no more prepared than the older generation to save Horace's soul or his life. And as he views the aftermath of Horace's horrible…
I love sport. I played my last game of cricket when I was 69 and, as I approach my eightieth year, I continue to play golf, confusing my partners by switching from right to left hand when chipping and putting. I like watching sport but prefer to spectate via television rather than being there. I confess I do not fully understand American sports: I cannot fathom why a hit over the fence in baseball can score 1, 2, 3, or 4 rather than the undisputed 6 of cricket; and, while I admire the strategies of American football, I wonder why a ‘touchdown’ does not actually involve touching down.
Another dark side of sport is the position it accords women. In this accessible (but not dumbed down) work, American academic Jaime Schultz provides an overview of how women have fared over the years. Her approach is to pose a set of questions that are answered within chapters covering, for example, occupational opportunities, sex segregation (not, I would emphasise, in my bowls team), sexualities, female health, and the media. I admire Jaime for her determination to give women’s sport its rightful place not only in sports history but in contemporary society. She also deserves kudos when, though a young scholar, she challenged my views on methodology in sports history.
Although girls and women account for approximately 40 percent of all athletes in the United States, they receive only 4 percent of the total sport media coverage. SportsCenter, ESPN's flagship program, dedicates less than 2 percent of its airtime to women. Local news networks devote less than 5 percent of their programming to women's sports. Excluding Sports Illustrated's annual "Swimsuit Issue," women appear on just 4.9 percent of the magazine's covers.
Media is a powerful indication of the culture surrounding sport in the United States. Why are women underrepresented in sports media? Sports Illustrated journalist Andy Benoit infamously remarked that…
My
novels explore women whose contributions to culture have been relegated to the
footnotes of mainstream history books, and in few areas have women been more
overlooked than in sports. Because of the achievements of today’s female
athletes, ranging from the many athletic opportunities available to our young
daughters to the professional success of women like Serena Williams, it’s easy
to think that progress for women’s sports has come a long way—and in many ways, it has, thanks to legislative protections like Title IX—but these achievements reflect
over a century’s worth of sacrifice by many unheralded women athletes. Here are
five books that highlight this journey.
In this novel that feels ripped straight from the headlines, the life of a young woman training as an elite gymnast is upended when her best friend confides that their doctor has assaulted her. Not only is this story timely, but it provides a glimpse into the mind-boggling discipline and talent it takes to be an Olympic gymnast.
"Propulsive, transfixing, and disturbing. I could not set the book down. Harrowing and fearlessly honest, The Happiest Girl in the World is a haunting read because it couldn't have done justice to its subjects - fictional and real - any other way." -Popsugar
One of Good Morning America's Best Books of April!
From the acclaimed author of Mercy House comes a gripping new novel about a young woman's dreams of Olympic gymnastic gold-and what it takes to reach the top
For Sera Wheeler, the Olympics is the reason for everything. It's why she trains thirty hours a week, starves herself…
I have been privileged to cover sports for the Boston Globe for the last 40-plus years. It is the best place in the country to do what I do. New England has tradition, smart readers, historic teams, and a great deal of success, especially in this century. As an author of 14 books, it's nice to bring some sports to the conversation on this site.
The author looks back on 50 years of sportswriting. This is a personal book, rich with stories of the sports gods of the 1960s and 1970s. Callahan was an insider and has stuff on Larry Bird and Muhammad Ali that no one else has. Callahan presents a fascinating earlier time when newspaper beat reporters were valuable to the team's they covered. Cincinnati Royals coach Bob Cousy refused an airline's request to bounce Callahan off a commercial flight, telling the pilot "we fly as a team and he is with us."
As a columnist for Time magazine, among many other publications, Tom Callahan witnessed an extraordinary number of defining moments in American sport across four decades. He takes us from Roberto Clemente clinching his 3,000th, and final, regular-season hit in Pittsburgh; to ringside for the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight in Zaire; and to Arthur Ashe announcing, at a news conference, that he'd tested positive for HIV. There are also little-known private moments: Joe Morgan whispering thank you to a virtually blind Jackie Robinson on the field at the 1972 World Series, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saying he was more interested in being…
As a kid, I loved books of all shapes and sizes, especially those written by Irish authors. They made me feel like there was a chance of my own dream coming true – that I would walk into my local bookshop and see a book with my name on the cover. In the last twenty years, we've seen an explosion of new Irish authors making their mark on the world of children’s literature. Don’t get me wrong, I adore leprechauns, and many of the classic Irish books that have been loved by previous generations. But there’s a crop of brand new Irish authors making some incredible work, and it’s time to give them some love!
Back to the non-fiction shelf for my last pick – which is a whistle-stop tour through the Irish sportswomen who have achieved greatness, but perhaps not always the recognition that they deserve.
Jacqui Hurley and her crack squad of illustrators have curated a book full of brilliant role models for all the young women out there who dream of representing their county, their country, or even those who just need some inspiration to go out on the pitch and do their best.
It’s essential reading for any young sports fan, no matter who they are!
Irish sportswomen have been breaking the mould for a long time. From Maeve Kyle becoming Ireland’s first female Olympian in 1956, to motorsport pioneer Rosemary Smith breaking the land-speed record in 1978. Through the 1990s and 2000s we had world champions in Sonia O’Sullivan, Derval O’Rourke, and Olive Loughnane. More recently, the success of Katie Taylor, Kellie Harrington, and Annalise Murphy has kept Irish sportswomen on the global map. But amidst their success stories, the battle for recognition continues. Female athletes still receive only a small proportion of the media coverage their male counterparts receive. This book will break the…
As a writer, I’ve found that learning about other writers and their processes helps me. Over the years, I’ve devoured the memoirs and letters of writers like Madeleine L’Engle, Audre Lorde, and Zora Neal Hurston. In 2006, when I started a writing program for young people in my city, I brought these writers’ words to use as writing prompts. When I researched my book, Mightier Than the Sword, I read dozens of anthologies to find people who used writing to make a difference in their fields—science, art, politics, music, and sports. I will always be grateful for those anthologies—because they broadened my knowledge and introduced me to so many interesting people.
Over the years, I’ve met many young people who are more interested in sports than social studies. I was so excited to find this book—because it helps sports-minded kids see the tremendous contribution young women have made to both sports and social change. You’ll read about how these women overcame barriers, competed in challenging circumstances, and still broke records. You will also learn how they are still making a difference in the world. These multidimensional heroes help us want to be more like them!
Do you play sports? Maybe you dream about scoring a goal on the soccer field or hitting a home run in baseball. Perhaps you're thinking about trying a new sport, but you're still not sure.
In We Got Game you'll meet thirty-five female athletes who played hard, broke records, and inspired girls around the world. Some of these athletes have retired. Others are still competing. But they have one thing in common: they all got game! You'll read about the first woman horse jockey to compete in the Kentucky Derby, the number one tennis player in the world, a surfer…
I was a very active kid – the kind of kid who was constantly told to sit still and be quiet. Growing up in the 1960s, I had few opportunities to engage in athletics, other than neighborhood games of tag and kick-the-can. But when I got to high school, our school district had just begun offering competitive sports for girls. Finally, my energy and athletic ability were appreciated (at least by my coaches and teammates). So I guess it was inevitable that when I began writing books for young readers, I would start with a book about a girl who loves sports.
Today’s young readers can’t believe that when I was in high school, our basketball team was only allowed in the gym when the boys weren’t using it. They can’t believe there was a time when people thought girls shouldn’t play competitive sports. But really, who could believe it? Who could believe it would take an act of Congress – the 1972 law known as Title IX – to guarantee girls and women the right to equal opportunities in every academic field and in athletics? I love this book because it tells the story of Title IX, a law that mandated academic equity for girls and women, and changed the world for girls who love sports.
Can girls play softball? Can girls be school crossing guards? Can girls become lawyers or doctors or engineers? Of course they can... today. But just a few decades ago, opportunities for girls were far more limited, not because they weren't capable or didn't want to, but because they weren't allowed to. Ages 8-12.
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