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  The Cricketer Book of Cricket...

  Christopher Martin Jenkins

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  Long out of print, the late Christopher Martin-Jenkins' humorous book The Cricketer Book of Eccentric Behaviour and Cricket Eccentric Eccentrics is at last available as an ebook. A noted cricket commentator, Editor of The Cricketer from 1980 and President of the Cricket Society from 1998 to 2008, Christopher had an encyclopaedic knowledge of cricket including a wealth of anecdotes and amusing stories which are regaled with humour in this book which was a popular best-seller when first published in the 1980s.

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  Slim and None

  Dan Jenkins

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  Dan Jenkins, sports novelist and writer for Golf Digest,  continues the story of Bobby Joe Grooves in Slim and None.  The aging pro-golfer is now 44, and he just has to win a major  this time around. Since the days when golfing was done with  a shepherd’s crook, only seven men have won a major after the  age of 44. Bobby Joe figures his chances are slim and none.  “Jenkins is as irreverent and hip a sports satirist as ever …”  —Publishers Weekly

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  Smart Wrong and Lucky - The...

  Jonathan Mayo

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  In the plainest of terms, baseball scouts are tasked with seeing the future—a distant future, at that. Baseball's long developmental arc leaves room for plenty of twists and turns on the way to The Show. Some prospects shoot like arrows toward their projected potential, while others fizzle out or chart an unexpected course.Joey Votto was a lightly scouted high schooler out of Ontario. Charlie Blackmon was once coveted for his left arm more than his offensive potential. Mookie Betts "lost interest in the draft" as he went unselected round after round. Jacob deGrom refused to relinquish his role as a shortstop. Lorenzo Cain never even put on a baseball glove until high school—and then wore it on the wrong hand.Smart, Wrong, and Lucky explores how first impressions measure up to their aftermaths: the draft, years of progression, and for a talented few, major-league success. MLB.com writer Jonathan Mayo profiles a diverse range of modern stars and looks at them through the eyes of those who noticed them first as prospects.Featuring exclusive interviews with scouts, players, coaches, and more, this fascinating collection of origin stories is an ode to baseball's endless possibilities.

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  Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads...

  Irvin Muchnick

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  By now, football's concussion crisis is well known: every year brings headlines of our Hall of Fame heroes behaving erratically and dying young. But did you know that several kid players across the continent drop dead every year before a single ball is snapped—just from extreme conditioning drills directed by all-powerful coaches? Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads takes the conversation about football and public health to a new level with investigations of the sport's underreported worst tragedies and their cover-ups, at major universities, obscure junior colleges, and high schools. These add up to a kind of quiet pandemic—a socially induced one enabled by our thirst for spectacle and by a skewed vision of masculinity.Here are the shocking stories of young men who get struck down by exertional heatstroke and other causes sometimes not even acknowledged (such as the sickle cell trait syndrome that afflicts many African Americans). When the worst happens, the football world simply buries the evidence, pays off victims' families, and moves on.No matter how much we enjoy America's most popular sport at elite levels, this book makes the case that it belongs out of our public schools and off our public fields.

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  Deep Play - Climbing the world's...

  Paul Pritchard

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  Winner of the 1997 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, Paul Pritchard's Deep Play is a unique, stylish and timeless commentary reflecting the pressures and rewards of climbing some of the world's hardest and most challenging rock climbs. Pritchard started climbing in Lancashire before moving to join the vibrant Llanberis scene of the mid 1980s, at a time when the adventurous development of the Dinorwig slate quarries was in full swing. Many of the new slate routes were notable for their fierce technical difficulty and sparse protection, and Pritchard took a full part in this arcane sub-culture of climbing and at the same time deployed his skills on the Anglesey sea cliffs to produce a clutch of equally demanding wall climbs. Born with an adventurous soul, it was not long before Pritchard and his friends were planning exotic trips. In 1987, paired with Johnny Dawes, Pritchard made an epoch-making visit to Scotland's Sron Ulladale to free its famous aid route, The Scoop. Pritchard and Dawes, with no previous high altitude experience, then attempted the Catalan Pillar of Bhagirathi III in the Garwhal Himalaya in India, a precocious first expedition prematurely curtailed when Pritchard was hit by stonefall at the foot of the face. In 1992, Pritchard and Noel Craine teamed up with the alpinists Sean Smith and Simon Yates to climb a big wall route on the East Face of the Central Tower of Paine, Patagonia. Pritchard followed this with an equally fine first ascent of the West Face of Mt Asgard on Baffin Island. Other trips - to Yosemite, Pakistan and Nepal as well as returns to Patagonia - resulted in a clutch of notable repeats, first ascents and some failures. The failure list also included two life threatening falls (one on Gogarth, the other on Creag Meaghaidh), which prompted the author into thought-provoking personal re-assessments, in advance of his later near-terminal accident on The Totem Pole in Tasmania. A penetrating view of the adventures and preoccupations of a contemporary player, Deep Play stands alone as a unique first-hand account of what many consider to be the last great era in British climbing.

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  My Year of Running Dangerously

  Tom Foreman

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  As a journalist whose career spans three decades, CNN correspondent Tom Foreman has reported from the heart of war zones, riots, and natural disasters. He has interviewed serial killers and been in the line of fire. But the most terrifying moment of his life didn't occur on the job-it occurred at home, when his eighteen-year-old daughter asked, "How would you feel about running a marathon with me?"My Year of Running Dangerously is Foreman's journey through four half-marathons, three marathons, and one fifty-five-mile race. What started as an innocent request from his daughter quickly turned into a rekindled passion for long-distance running-for the training, the camaraderie, the defeats, and the victories. Told with honesty and humor, Foreman's account captures the universal fears of aging and failure alongside the hard-won moments of triumph, tenacity, and going further than you ever thought possible.

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