Other books that might interest you

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  Root Root Root for the Home...

  Tom Dobrez

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  Grab your seat next to a super fan who stopped at nothing to enter his generation's premier Chicago sports events. 
  This is your chance to experience the city's most memorable sports moments, from the two Bears’ Super Bowls, the White Sox pennant clincher in Anaheim and their World Series winner in Houston to the Blackhawks Game 7 disappointment in 1971 and the traumatic overtime win in Philadelphia for their first of three Cups. But it’s not just title thrills; you are also there for the dozens of ‘almosts’ that cloud the Second City’s grand sports tradition. 
  But more than a sports story, ROOT, ROOT, ROOT FOR THE HOME TEAMS draws from the personal experiences of a faithful fan. It is a tale of growing up a Chicago sports fan. It turns out there is more to sports than who wins and loses. A loving tale of a father who raised his sons to understand what sports teach us about family and what success in life really looks like. 
  Root Root Root is a love story of family, friends, and Chicago sports. For more than six decades, Tom Dobrez has been in the arena for hundreds of sporting events, along with his share of brushes with greatness. Come along as he chases Muhammad Ali’s Rolls Royce through his suburban hometown. Take a late-night shift, play Pop-A-Shot with Scottie Pippen, play 18 holes of golf with Toni Kukoc, and get a champagne shower from Mark Buehrle. 
  There’s plenty of heartbreak and redemption along the way. He losses his father on the eve of the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup championship. He celebrates the memory of his brother at a Bears game and deals with the challenge of passing on his loyalty to his children despite his shortcomings as a youth sports coach. 
  With these and other moral dilemmas of parenting and growing up a Croatian in Chicago’s south suburbs, Dobrez weaves a raconteur’s storytelling skill with life lessons all gained from watching sports.

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  Heisman - The Man Behind the Trophy

  John M. Heisman, Mark Schlabach

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  To the select fraternity of men who have won the Heisman Trophy since its inception in 1935, the award is so much more than just a football trophy. The Heisman is a national symbol of collegiate football experience and competitiveness. Over time, it has become the single most celebrated individual award in all of American sports. 
  Although the Heisman Trophy is old, it does not age. If anything, its impact gets stronger every year. No other individual award captures the country's imagination like the Heisman does. From the very first time toe meets leather to kick off a college football season, fans across the country begin debating which players will be the top Heisman Trophy candidates. 
  While the Heisman Trophy is the most famous individual award in sports, very little is known about John W. Heisman, the man the Downtown Athletic Club of New York chose to honor in 1936 by naming its national player of the year award for him. 
  In Heisman: The Man Behind the Trophy, John M. Heisman, the legendary coach's great-nephew, and New York Times bestselling author Mark Schlabach offer college football fans across the country the first authorized and definitive biography of the man whose life has been memorialized by the Heisman Trophy. 
  After combing through thousands of pages of Heisman's personal documents, writings, playbooks, and never-before-published correspondence with some of college football's most famous coaches, the authors have chronicled Heisman's life from a young boy growing up on the oil fields of northwest Pennsylvania to eventually becoming one of the sport's most innovative and successful coaches.

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  A Different America - How Our...

  Matthew Andrews

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  One Day University presents a series of audio lectures recorded in real-time from some of the top minds in the United States. Given by award-winning professors and experts in their field, these recorded lectures dive deep into the worlds of religion, government, literature, and social justice. How much has American society changed since the 1960s? And how do you gauge the extent of this change? In this session, we will try to answer these questions by exploring a few of the more significant and pivotal moments in American history through the prism of sports. We will look beyond competitive outcomes on the fields of play—who won, who lost, and by how much?—and instead will focus on what these moments can reveal about the struggles for racial justice and gender equality in our nation. Throughout our session, we will consider the ways sports—a marathon, a college football game, a prizefight, a tennis match—have reflected larger trends in American life as well as influenced American history and the nation we occupy today. Whether the impact of sports on American culture has been positive or negative is another question we will consider.

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  Best of Enemies - John Caldwell...

  Barry Flynn, Padraig Lawlor,...

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  In the 1950s and 1960s, boxers John Caldwell and Freddie Gilroy reached the very pinnacle of their sport and brought immense pride to Belfast and Ireland. This is their story of friendship and rivalry, of glory and pain, of riches and poverty. Belfast is world-renowned for her glovemen. Best of Enemies explores the careers of two of the city's finest exponents of the noble art of boxing. As friends, they won Olympic medals for Ireland. As professionals, they quickly became bitter adversaries. Their rivalry peaked when Caldwell claimed a share of the world bantamweight crown in a fight that had been promised to Gilroy. Thereafter, the Belfast fighters were on a collision course. The two finally met in a bloody battle in Belfast's King's Hall on Saturday, 20 October 1962. However, that brutal night did not resolve the question of who was the better boxer, which lingers to this day.

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  Mint Condition - How Baseball...

  Dave Jamieson

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  “An entertaining history of baseball cards . . . An engaging book on a narrow but fascinating topic.” —The Washington Post   When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson’s parents sold his childhood home a few years ago, he rediscovered a prized boyhood possession: his baseball card collection. Now was the time to cash in on the “investments” of his youth. But all the card shops had closed, and cards were selling for next to nothing online. What had happened?   In Mint Condition, his fascinating, eye-opening, endlessly entertaining book, Jamieson finds the answer by tracing the complete story of this beloved piece of American childhood. Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector’s items. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. In the 1930s, cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players association into one of the country’s most powerful unions, dramatically altering the game. In the eighties and nineties, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing, surviving today as the rarified preserve of adult collectors. Mint Condition is charming, original history brimming with colorful characters, sure to delight baseball fans and collectors.   “Jamieson explores the history of card collecting through an entertaining cast of characters . . . For anyone who can recall being excited to rip open their newest pack of cards, Mint Condition is a treat.” —Forbes

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  Tough Luck - Sid Luckman Murder...

  R. D. Rosen

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  “Rosen artfully blends fascinating tales of the rise of the National Football League with the bloody demise of the mob.” —Bill Geist, New York Times–bestselling author 
   
  In 1935, as eighteen-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines for the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, when Sid became a star at Columbia and a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback in Chicago, all of it while Meyer Luckman served twenty-years-to-life in Sing Sing Prison, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades. 
   
  Tough Luck traces two simultaneous historical developments through a single immigrant family in Depression-era New York: the rise of the National Football League led by the dynastic Chicago Bears and the demise—triggered by Meyer Luckman’s crime and initial coverup—of the Brooklyn labor rackets and Louis Lepke’s infamous organization Murder, Inc. Filled with colorful characters, it memorably evokes an era of vicious Brooklyn mobsters and undefeated Monsters of the Midway, a time when the media kept their mouths shut and the soft-spoken son of a murderer could become a beloved legend with a hidden past. 
   
  “Remarkable . . . Artfully organized and deeply researched . . . This [secret] is finally being told, respectfully and stylishly.” —Chicago Tribune 
   
  “This is a great and beautifully written untold story.” —Gay Talese, New York Times–bestselling author 
   
  “A fascinating story of the NFL, its growth, and one of its star players. And it is more than just a sports biography.” —Illinois Times

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