The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics and What Matters in the End by Gary M. Pomerantz

The Last Pass is a gorgeous book, elegiac and full of both love and regret. Over the course of more than fifty interviews, Gary Pomerantz was able to tap into the psyche of NBA legend Bob Cousy as no one else ever has, coming to understand Cousy the man as well as Cousy the icon. In this book, the highs of his basketball career are recounted, but at the core of this book is Cousy’s regret about not standing up more for racial justice during his career and his sadness that he and Bill Russell have drifted apart over the course of the last five decades. This helps the Last Pass transcend its status as a history of the Celtics — plenty of which already exist — into something closer to American history, showing how we are asked, if not forced, to reckon with our past and figure out how to transform that wreckage into a better future, realizing how easy it is to ignore the injustice that surrounds us.

The Good Son: the Life of Ray ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini by Mark Kriegel

Mark Kriegel is better at writing biographies than most people are at anything. The Good Son, his third following previous books on Joe Namath and Pete Maravich, focuses on lightweight champion Ray Mancini, who became a hero to many in the early 80’s as he appeared to be the real life Rocky — a white man from the Rust Belt who became the champion of the world, fulfilling the dream his father was never able to due to injuries suffered in World War II. However, Mancini became better known for the tragic death of his opponent Duk Koo Kim, mere days after they fought in Las Vegas. Kriegel does a great job of showing readers the full breadth of Mancini’s life, from his father’s aborted boxing dreams to his own rise and subsequent fall and finally towards his eventual making peace with Kim’s death. It’s a tragic book, but also one that is full of life and larger than life characters, one that fills in Kim’s life, making him more than a dead boxer, while showing that Mancini’s life contained much more than one heartbreaking night.

When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss

When Pride Still Mattered may be the best biography I’ve ever read, no qualifiers needed. The depth of Maraniss’ research is truly overwhelming — at times, I found myself wondering how on earth he unearthed particular anecdotes or was able to dive so deeply into the mind of someone who had been dead nearly thirty years by the time this book was published. Maraniss does an especially great job showing the division Lombardi felt between his private longings as a devout Catholic, and former seminary student, to do more ostensibly important work, and what he felt his true calling was as a football coach, capturing the division that lay at the heart of his life and the conflict that he carried with him for decades, shaping him and his coaching philosophies as much as anything else.

Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game edited by Alexander Wolff

I guess it’s kind of cheating including an anthology like this on here, but it absolutely belongs. This book covers the history of basketball from its invention up to today and highlights several of the most iconic teams and players of the game’s history, including profiles of Julius Erving, Larry Bird, and LeBron James as well as writing from great players including Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It’s a beautifully compiled collection, one that contains something to love for every fan of basketball or great writing.

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life by Richard Ben Cramer

In American culture, Joe DiMaggio was much more than a great baseball player; he was an icon, a symbol of grace and heroism that spoke deeply to the American people throughout his playing career. And after his career, he continued to represent to many the best of a bygone era and what had been lost. Richard Ben Cramer, in this tremendous biography, gives an in depth account of DiMaggio’s life and career, but just as importantly, focuses on how and why DiMaggio became this hero to so many, which is a major part of what makes this so much better than the average sports biography. Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, also writes tremendously, making this seem more like a novel than a biography as he captures the inner life of a figure who always resisted the public’s desire to see him as he was away from the cameras.

Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger

Friday Night Lights is not exactly what I expected it to be. Sure, it’s a football book that tracks the Permian Panthers throughout the 1988 season, but it’s really more of a sociological study about a town that is obsessed with football than it is about football itself. It’s about a West Texas town full of racial divisions, a town that is recovering from the fall of the oil business a few years prior, a town that remains loyal to Republican politics despite being badly hurt by Reagan’s economic policies, a town where getting a scholarship to play college football is the only realistic hope for many to move out and expand their horizons. The writing is electric and acerbic, but clear-eyed, capturing the strangeness and the humanity of the people in Odessa along with how football sustains them throughout the times little else seems available to offer similar solace.

Long Time Coming: A Black Athlete’s Coming of Age in America by Chet Walker with Chris Messenger

I’ve read more autobiographies and memoirs by athletes than I can count, and while most are largely boilerplate and generally forgettable, occasionally one comes along that surprises you and stays with you long after reading it and Chet Walker’s Long Time Coming definitely falls in the later category. While it is certainly a memorable tale of athletic triumph, and a great recounting of the NBA in the 60’s and early 70’s, it is primarily the tale of a black athlete attempting to understand himself and find his place in a turbulent era. Walker’s self-awareness and self-questioning help raise this book to another level, as he wonders page after page about the morality and importance of professional sports and his place in it. Long Time Coming is a meditation on both basketball and the Civil Rights Movement, setting it apart from many other basketball player’s autobiographies, making it one of the best, and most thoughtful, in the genre.

The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created by Jane Leavy

It’s hard to imagine that we really needed a new Babe Ruth biography, but Jane Leavy proves skeptics wrong with her new book, which makes the case for its necessity chapter after chapter. Leavy, well aware of the multiplicity of books on Ruth does a few things to set The Big Fella apart. First, she chooses to use Ruth and Lou Gehrig’s 1927 barnstorming tour as a framing device, giving a day by day account of their cross country trip throughout the book. Secondly, she focuses a lot more than previous biographers have on Ruth’s upbringing, his time at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, and how being abandoned by his parents at a young age must have shaped him for the rest of his life. And finally, the book is at its best when it examines Ruth’s status as perhaps the nation’s first major celebrity in the age of mass media and how he both shaped and shattered precedents. In this regard, The Big Fella is as much a cultural history of post-World War I America as it is a biography of Ruth, and the book is all the better for it. The Big Fella will not be the last word on Ruth — for how could a figure as outsized and inscrutable as him ever be conclusively pinned down — but it’s nevertheless a worthy addition to the canon of great baseball books.

The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire by John Eisenberg

In essentially every history of the NFL, the 1958 League Championship game is often cited as the turning point for the league, the moment when it finally resonated with America and ensured its long term viability. However, what these histories miss is that the NFL somehow, against all odds, had to endure for nearly 40 years to even reach that point. John Eisenberg shows how they managed to do that by profiling five owners — George Halas, Bert Bell, George Preston Marshall, Art Rooney, and Tim Mara — and chronicling the decisions they made that allowed the NFL to survive and eventually thrive, becoming the most successful professional sports league in the United States. It’s a largely unknown story and I am glad that a reporter as experienced and knowledgeable as Eisenberg was able to tell it.

Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South by Andrew Maraniss

Despite being a pioneer, becoming the first black varsity basketball player in SEC history, the story of Perry Wallace is largely unknown to most, but Strong Inside, Andrew Maraniss’ biography of Wallace goes to great lengths to try to remedy that. Strong Inside is a testament to Wallace’s courage and strength, but it’s also a tale of ambivalence and confusion as he also struggled to endure and make sense of his time at Vanderbilt, wondering whether his actions were worth the suffering he endured or if they made any lasting difference. The book is also very good at adopting a wider viewpoint than just Wallace’s story as it looks at the larger scope of his actions, placing them in a historical context that makes them more meaningful, making Strong Inside more than a biography of a basketball player, but an important work of Civil Rights history as well.

The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match That Made Chess Great Again by Brin-Jonathan Butler

I’ll be honest — when I first received my copy of The Grandmaster, I was a bit skeptical I’d enjoy it all that much. I’m neither a chess player or fan, but I decided to give it a shot and I am very glad I did as this turned out to be one of the most engaging, well-written, and fascinating books I read this year. While the book is ostensibly focused on the 2016 World Chess Championships, Butler also looks at the wider world of chess and the strange subcultures created because of it. Additionally, the legend of Bobby Fischer is analyzed and dissected as is the gender gap in competitive chess along with the connection between chess greatness and mental illness. I absolutely devoured this book and I imagine most readers will feel the same way as I did if they seek it out.

Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman
Over thirty years have now passed since the USFL shuttered its doors for good, failing to achieve the merger it had hoped for, running out of money after its plan to move from the spring to the fall proved unwise and foolhardy, but Jeff Pearlman brings the league to life in his newest book, Football for a Buck. Throughout the book, Pearlman profiles many of the league’s greatest characters and players, while also highlighting the teams that were most notable, either for their successes on the field, or the strange messes they made off of it. It’s a consistently entertaining and often hilarious book and, considering that much of the blame for the league’s failures can be placed on the shoulders of a brash and idiotic New York businessman named Donald Trump, it has an additional, and unfortunate, resonance today.

You can hear interviews with Jeff Pearlman, Brin-Jonathan Butler, Alexander Wolff, Gary Pomerantz, John Eisenberg and many more on the Pros & Prose podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts.