Why are sports books a tough sell?

I offered to let my dad borrow that Leahy book, but after telling him a little bit about it, he said, "Nah, I'd rather just remember Jordan for what he did on the court."

That said, I thought Leahy attacked that story with more than a smidge of newsside arrogance. Most of the time his tone was as if he couldn't imagine why anyone would EVER be so transfixed by what a man could do with a ball and a hoop.

 

I took it more as exposing a star for what he really is and thought it was the best sports book I've read in ages. I understand why some people don't want their sports heroes exposed for the assholes that most of them are.

 

Men don't read as much. You'll see books published with the idea that they will be great Father's Day gifts or Christmas gifts. But really, men do no buy books for themselves or others as much as women do.

 

If you can get Oprah behind a sports book, then you've got something..."Barack on Bball" or something like that

 

Well, she pimped for that fine piece of fiction that is "Tuesdays with Morrie"

 

You know, I started doing a book review a week of a sports book for my paper, probably about a year ago. That's at least 50 books, more or less, that I've slogged through. And I read every word, unlike many reviewers.

I can count the ones I thought were really, really good (in my own humble opinion, of course) on the fingers of one hand. I mean the ones that just rolled, the ones it didn't seem like work to read.

Maybe that's the problem. Most of them just aren't very good.

And I'm a reader. I'll read anything - the back of a Cornflake box, in three or four different languages, whatever. Anything. So it's not as though even a hernia-inducing Feinstein book on those two boring guys is, normally, doing to give me pause. But God, I read that one, and I thought, "Okay, at some point you've got to cut your losses and realize there's just no book there."

I kept thinking, "Maybe had it been Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez, a pair like that." How could he even think those two subjects had a hope in hell.

Ironically, Feinstein was a year ahead of his time. Had he written about both those pitchers the following year, he would have had something a little more interesting.

 

We did book reviews for a while at my place. Books that came in unsolicited or books I bought. Didn't take up much space on a Sunday, one a week. Our editor said don't bother to. "Our readers don't read," was the exact quote.

 

There are only so many season diaries and young-phenom-reaches-top stories you can read. Lewis' Blind Side does a good job on the macro and micro aspects of football and privilege.

 

Note to young writers who want to write books of their own some day: Never write book reviews; they can come back to bite you hard, and the free books aren't worth it.

-One Knows of What He Speaks and Stopped in Time

 

It's both surprising how touchy and insecure some writers are if you don't blow them, and how impressed others are that you actually read the whole book and picked up on the subtleties. It's an interesting journey.

And I've already done a book. Don't want to do another. ;-)

 

The sports books I am into now are the ones about obscure athletes that make me wonder why anyone would have green-lighted them in the first place. For example, "Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer" by Johnny Sample. Now tell me, why the heck would anyone think that book was a good idea in the first place? Here's a defensive back who was not that good, not that dirty and not that popular writing a book that no one bought. Also read the Charles Thompson book about Oklahoma Football in the 1980's...what a piece of crap that was...all he wanted to do was put his spin on the drug deal he went down for. But those kinds of books are what I am reduced to because I have read everything else.

 

The trick is finding a compelling well-known topic---sports figure, team, event---that hasn't been scrutinized much in book form and do a dogged job digging out the juicy story and writing it well. Oh, I'm "stating the obvious?" Obvioulsy not, or we would have a lot more books like that out there.

Good examples---the Ben Hogan biography Curt Sampson did about 10-12 years ago, Jim Dent's book Junction Boys. Books that when you see them and read them, folks like us slap our forehead and say, "Why in the heck didn't I think of this?" Sampson's book was published by a fairly small publisher and still sold---NET sales---about 85,000 copies. That may not be Grisham territory, but it puts it in the 99th percentile of sports books, literally.