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Richard Russell

He is not a pro golfer. Nor a successful amateur, or a respected writer on the game. He is not a golf commentator, or a caddie, or a gold guru, or a Dutch sports psychologist, or ageing, golf-playing light entertainer.

No: Richard Russell is just an ordinary golfer. An under-achieving member of Sunningdale, whose only claim to fame is that he never, ever wears a sweater – not even in January. He plays of 6, which is the worst handicap anyone can have in golf: too low to win the handicap competition, too high to win the scratch ones. Consequently, his life is one of joint fifteenths and dusty mantelpieces.

Part autobiography, part theory, part book of golfing fun, My Baby Got the Yips is unlike any golf book you've ever read. It doesn’ t lift the lid on the Ryder Cup. It won’ t reveal the man behind the myth, and it doesn’ t go behind the scenes at the Majors. This playful memoir of a golfing nobody is concerned with much more interesting and rarely-ponders matters.

For example: the best way to throw a golf club; the greatest golfer you've never heard of; the ten most marvellous golfing moments; the champion who became a hacker; the impossibleness of putting; the civilised splendour of the halfway hut, and the secret of golf. As you reach the end, you will conclude that this is a man who feels about golf the way that millions around the world do. Charming, funny and wise, My Baby got the Yips captures the essence of the game and touches everybody who plays it.

Aurum

Sports Classics

My Baby Got the Yips: The Random Thoughts of an Unprofessional Golfer

From Jack London to Joyce Carol Oates, The Hurt Business is the ultimate boxing book covering a century of the greatest fighter and the writers who have followed 'the sweet science'.

Beginning with Jack London's account of the 1910 championship bout between Jack Johnson and James Jeffries (for which the Call of the Wildman called for and coined the term "The Great White Hope"), and ending with Carlo Rotella's 2002 homage to Larry Holmes ("Champion at Twilight"), The Hurt Business is a near century's worth of rip-roaring reveal. Some of it comes ringside, like Norman Mailer et; some of it comes from the gym, like Pete Hamill's "Up the Stairs with Cus D'Amato"; and some of it comes from so far behind the scenes you feel as if you've been eavesdropping - Thomas Hauser's excerpt from The Black Lights.

For fans of Norman Mailer's The Fight or George Kimball's Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing, The Hurt Business belongs on the shelves of any fan of boxing or sublime sports writing.

The Hurt Business: A Century of the Greatest Writing on Boxing

Arthur Hopcraft

‘Football matters, as poetry does to some people and alcohol does to others… Football is inherent in the people… There is more eccentricity in deliberately disregarding it than in devoting a life to it. The way we play the game, organize it and reward it reflects the kind of community we are’

Written just two years after England’s ’66 triumph when the national game was at its zenith, Arthur Hopcraft’s The Football Man is repeatedly quoted as the best book ever written about the sport. This definitive, magisterial study of football and society profiles includes interviews with all-time greats like Bobby Charlton, George Best, Alf Ramsay, Stanley Matthews, Matt Busby and Nat Lofthouse. It is a snapshot of a pivotal era in sporting history; changes and decisions were made in the sixties that would create the game we know today.

For many who are disenchanted with the modern game – the grip of businesses and corporations, the dominance of advertising, the extortionate ticket prices and inaccessible matches, the fickleness of teenage millionaires – The Football Man takes the reader back to the heart and soul of the national game when pitches were muddy and the players were footballers not brands. Voted in May 2005 as one of Observer’s top sports books of all time, this is a long-awaited reissue of the classic football ‘bible’.

‘Masterpiece among sports books’ Guardian

‘It remains one of my favourite football reads’ Graham Taylor

The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer

Roger Kahn

This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America.

'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.

The Boys of Summer

It remains a unique achievement. In 1971 the British Lions went to New Zealand and beat the All Blacks in a test series on their own soil. With gritty, never-say-die forwards like Ian McLaughlan and Mervyn Davies, and brilliant backs like Barry John, Gerald Davies and David Duckham, and under the inspired management of one of the finest coaches of all time, Carwyn James, the Lions won the first match, lost the second, and then came back to clinch the series in the third.

But this unique rugby feat also spawned a unique book, for after the touring party had returned to the UK, the Lions captain John Dawes had the idea of organising an International Players' Conference, at which he and some of the key members of his victorious team would discuss the latest trends in rugby and offer the fruits of their experience in how to beat the greatest rugby team in the world. These talks and lectures were subsequently edited into a book, The Lions Speak by the Daily Telegraph's Rugby Correspondent, John Reason. In the years since it was first published, it has assumed cult status as one of the best and most insightful books ever published about the game of rugby.

It stands as both a fascinating period piece about a sport that was played very differently in those days - when Bob Hiller would toe-punt penalties and conversions from a lovingly-crafted mud tee, and scrum halves like Gareth Edwards would launch his back-line from the scrum with a flamboyant diving pass - and a brilliant and witty deconstruction of the game's strategy and psychology by some of its most greatest and most intelligent practitioners, that is as relevant and valuable today as it ever was. Who better to talk about kicking and controlling the game than Barry John, or Mike Gibson on the role of the centre, or Carwyn James himself to reveal the secrets of his coaching methods that brought about the 1971 Lions' historic victory and British rugby's finest hour?

How We Beat the All Blacks: The 1971 Lions Speak

Derek Birley

Acclaimed as a magisterial, classic work, A Social History of English Cricket is an encyclopaedic survey of the game, from its humble origins all the way to modern floodlit finishes. But it is also the story of English culture, mirrored in a sport that has always been a complex repository of our manners, hierarchies and politics. Derek Birley’s survey of the impact on cricket of two world wars, Empire and ‘the English caste system’, will, contends Ian Wooldridge, ‘teach an intelligent child of twelve more about their heritage than he or she will ever pick up at school.’

 In just under 400 pages Birley takes us through a rich historical tapestry: how the game was snatched from rustic obscurity by gentlemanly gamblers; became the height of late eighteenth century metropolitan fashion; was turned into both symbol and synonym for British imperialism; and its more recent struggle to dislodge the discomforting social values preserved in the game from its imperial heyday. 

 Superbly witty and humorous, peopled by larger-than-life characters from Denis Compton to Ian Botham, and wholly forswearing nostalgia, A Social History of English Cricket is a tour-de-force by one of the great writers on cricket.

Sports Classics - The book series

Sports Classics - The book series

Sports Classics books in order

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