Best three sports books you ever read?

The Game -- Ken Dryden
The Game of our Lives -- Pete Gzowski
Three Bricks Shy of a Load -- Roy Blount

 

Numerous selections from the Choose Your Own Adventure series.

 

Joe McGinniss, The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
Terry Pluto, Loose Balls
Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

 

Completely forgot about Friday Night Lights. Not sure it'd bump any off my top 3, but it's an excellent read.

Into Thin Air was an excellent read as well, but I didn't think of it as a sports book.

 

Friday Night Lights would have been great except for the ultraliberal, chanting, flowing bullshit in every other chapter.

 

Bringing the Heat
Friday Night Lights
Praying for Gil Hodges

 

Couple that haven't been mentioned yet:

Secretariat, by William Nack (really any of Nack's books are very good).

Ernie Harwell's books about baseball, short stories that he has heard or seen.

 

I'll play along.

Ball Four
When Pride Still Mattered
The Wrong Stuff (by Bill Lee).

 

Loose Balls and Ball Four, definitely. A recent candidate for add would be Richard Hoffer's "Something in the Air."

 

Impossible task for me, so we'll limit mine to the current season:

Veeck as in Wreck
Brosnan's The Long Season
Across the Board, by Toney Betts (the greatest book about the day-to-day
of horse racing, ever).

 

Hey, he got threads locked on the jobs and JTO boards. That's quite an accomplishment ... *blue font off*

Friday Night Lights is at the top of my list. Not going to take the sorry bait on the political implications.
Followed by Into Thin Air ... yep, it's a sports book...
And not to appear like a Krakauer honk ... but "Where Men Win Glory," his Pat Tillman book. Debatable even more than "Into Thin Air" as far as sports credentials ... but the sports connection is there.

 

"What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now" by Richard Ben Cramer was also very good.

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