5 New Sports Books to Watch Out For

What’s your sport? Football? Rugby? Boxing? Cricket? Athletics? If you answered yes to any of those, we’ve got something for you.

The Meaning of Cricket: or How to Waste Your Life on an Inconsequential Sport by Jon Hotten (7 Jul 2016)
Cricket is unique among sports in its psychological aspect. It is a team game dependent almost entirely on individual performance. Time, opportunity and the constant threat of disaster can drive its participants to despair. Surviving a single 100 mph delivery takes the body and brain to the edges of their capabilities, yet the game’s abiding image is of the village green, and the glorious absurdities of the amateur player. By blending legends of the game, from Vivian Richards to Brian Lara, Kevin Pietersen to Ricky Ponting, with a personal story, Jon Hotten reveals the funny, moving and transformative impact cricket can have on a single life.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown (26 Jul 2016)
The #1″New York Times” bestselling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany, now in a premium mass market edition. Available just in time for The 80th anniversary of the boys gold medal win as well as the 8/2 broadcast of the PBS /American Experience documentary, “The Boys of 36.” and the start of the 2016 Summer Olympics.

For readers of”Unbroken,” out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant.
It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University of Washington s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young man s personal quest.”

Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammed Ali’s Last Fight by Dave Hannigan (18 Aug 2016)
On December 11, 1981, Muhammad Ali slumped on a chair in the cramped, windowless locker room of a municipal baseball field outside Nassau. A phalanx of sportswriters had pushed and shoved their way into this tiny, breeze-blocked space. In this most unlikely of settings, they had come to record the last moments of the most storied of all boxing careers. They had come to intrude upon the grief. “It’s over,” mumbled Ali. “It’s over.” The show that had entertained and wowed from Zaire to Dublin, from Hamburg to Manila, finally ended its twenty-one-year run, the last performance not so much off-Broadway, more amateur theatre in the boondocks. In Drama in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali’s last bout. Through interviews with many of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks short of his fortieth birthday, a seriously diminished Ali stepped through the ropes one more time to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick. “Two billion people will be conscious of my fight,” said Ali, trotting out the old braggadocio about an event so lacking in luster that a cow bell was pressed in to service to signal the start and end of each round. How had it come to this? Why was he still boxing? Hannigan answers those questions and many more, offering a unique and telling glimpse into the most fascinating sportsman of the twentieth century in the last, strange days of his fistic life. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, is proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports–books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. In addition to books on popular team sports, we also publish books for a wide variety of athletes and sports enthusiasts, including books on running, cycling, horseback riding, swimming, tennis, martial arts, golf, camping, hiking, aviation, boating, and so much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Angels with Dirty Faces: How Argentinian Soccer Defined a Nation and Changed the Game Forever by Jonathan Wilson (23 August 2016)
Argentina has produced Alfredo Di Stefano, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messisome of the greatest soccer players of all time. The country s rich, volatile history is by turns sublime and ruthlessly pragmatic. A nation obsessed with soccer, Argentina lives and breathes the game, its theories, and its myths. Jonathan Wilson lived in Buenos Aires, in an apartment between La Recoleta Cemeterywhere the country s leading poets and politicians are buriedand the Huracan stadium. Like his apartment, “Angels with Dirty Faces” lies at the intersection of politics, literature, and sport. Here, he chronicles the evolution of Argentinian soccer: the appropriation of the British game, the golden age of “la nuestra,” the exuberant style of playing that developed as Juan Peron led the country into isolation, a hardening into the brutal methods of anti-futbol, the fusing of beauty and efficacy under Cesar Luis Menotti, and the emergence of all-time greats in Maradona and Messi against a backdrop of economic turbulence.”

Carry Me Home: My Autobiography by Ben Cohen (8 Sep 2016)
Ben Cohen’s dad didn’t know anything about the sport his young son had taken up, but he was happy to drive him to practice, and was soon helping out at the club. When his business went bankrupt money was tight, but Ben’s hard working parents inspired their son to put his all into rugby.

Then, when Ben was 20, his father intervened in a fight in the nightclub where he worked. He was viciously beaten and one month later he died in hospital. Ben was doing an England press conference at the time, and it was down to coach Clive Woodward to deliver the devastating news. But the ordeal was far from over. The inquest lasted five months before the funeral could be held, and it was a year before the family were in court, facing Peter’s assailants.

Ben put all of the anger and pain from his father’s death into his rugby. Fast and powerful on the wing, he was soon the best in the world in his position and a cornerstone of the England team, culminating in the legendary World Cup win in Sydney in 2003. And yet he always felt like an outsider. Most people didn’t know that Ben is clinically deaf. His sixth sense for the game got him through on the pitch, but off it his poor hearing was often taken for arrogance.

This is an inspirational story of passion and pain; of the highs of achieving your goals, and the grief of losing something you can never get back.