Sports History

The number one New York Times best-selling story about American Olympic triumph in Nazi Germany, the inspiration for the PBS documentary The Boys of '36, broadcast to coincide with the 2016 Summer Olympics and the 80th anniversary of the boys' gold medal race....

From one of Outside magazine’s “Literary All-Stars” comes the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride ever through the Grand Canyon, atop the legendary Colorado River flood of 1983.

Correspondent Christopher Clarey sits down with Federer and those closest to him to tell the story of the greatest player in men's tennis....

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200....

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini....

In 1973, Secretariat, the greatest champion in horse-racing history, won the Triple Crown....

At The Athletic, home to the best newsroom in sports, this question would become a labor of love for dozens of the best football writers on the planet, including Mike Sando and Dan Pompei....

Nearly a millennium ago, Native Americans created lacrosse as a means of training warriors and settling disputes. Co-opted by whites in the late 1800s, played for a century largely at elite east coast colleges, over the past thirty years lacrosse has exploded around the world.

A groundbreaking, richly informative exploration of the central yet underappreciated role of muscle in human life and health, Stronger sounds an urgent call for each of us to recognize muscle as “the vital, inextricable and effective partner of the soul.”

Former NFL general manager and three-time Super Bowl winner Michael Lombardi takes listeners on the ultimate journey through the NFL's history to present his calls on the greatest players and coaches the sport has ever seen....

Francis Ouimet and Harry Vardon came from different worlds and different generations, but their passion for golf set them on parallel paths that would collide in the greatest match....

In 1965, 18-year old Lew Alcindor played basketball for Coach John Wooden at UCLA. It was the beginning of what was to become a 50-year long relationship....

A Season on the Brink chronicles the basketball season that John Feinstein spent following the Indiana Hoosiers and their fiery coach, Bob Knight....

Boys Will Be Boys immortalizes the most beloved - and despised - dynasty in NFL history....

Best-selling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost 300 interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era....

Henry Ford, Lee Iaococca and Carroll Shelby concoted a scheme to reinvent the Ford company. They would enter the high-stakes world of European car racing....

Based on years of archival research that unearthed Ederle’s memory from obscurity, Young Woman and the Sea is the exhilarating true story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel....

Award-winning journalist Maggie Mertens uncovers the story of how women broke into competitive running and how they are getting faster and fiercer every day—and changing our understanding of what is possible as they go.

The first in-depth look at Lance Armstrong's doping scandal, the phenomenal business success built on the back of fraud, and the greatest conspiracy in the history of sports....

The inside story of the crisis within the country’s most classic sport—horseracing—and why money is killing thoroughbreds at the top of their game.

New York Times bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the gritty, no-holds-barred account of the 1987 NBA season, a thrilling year of fierce battles and off-the-court drama between Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and Michael Jordan.

The definitive portrait of Kobe Bryant, from the author of Michael Jordan. Eighteen-time All-Star, scorer of 81 points in a single game, MVP, and one of the best shooting guards in NBA league history: Kobe Bryant is among basketball's absolute greatest players....

Mike Krzyzewski, known worldwide as “Coach K,” is a five-time national champion at Duke, the NCAA's all-time leader in victories with nearly 1,200, and the first man to lead Team USA to three Olympic basketball gold medals....

A New York Times best seller, David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979-80) in the life of the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions....

Bill Parcells may be the most iconic football coach of our time. During his decades-long tenure as an NFL coach, he turned failing franchises into contenders....

Every year, hundreds of horses die on the racetrack. Why? Death of a Racehorse delves deep into the horse racing world, offering intimate access to dozens of top trainers, owners, breeders, veterinarians, lab specialists, and more. The mainstream perception has been that rampant drug use is forcing these horses to run past their natural ability, resulting in heart attacks and broken legs. But this doesn’t paint the full picture.

Based on seven years of research and observation and crafted with consummate skill, The American Game takes listeners inside a unique cultural landscape that nonetheless reflects the wider world. Fluidly weaving in compelling action on the field from World Championships to tense NCAA tournaments, Price also chronicles the controversies and anomalies that have in many ways defined lacrosse. Racism stubbornly persists—and the Haudenosaunee have endured plenty in their rise—yet few mainstream entities have done more than lacrosse to champion the Native American experience.

This book is about the batters who see what mortals don’t. Javed Miandad purposefully makes errors to manipulate the field, Sachin Tendulkar dug up a pitch to take on Warne, Shivnarine Chanderpaul practised non-stop on a beach with tennis balls until he mastered technique and Joe Root’s great play against spin is known to be a confluence of three random events. Others, such as Smith, Pietersen and Richards, carried on the work of a man 100 years before their time, and Ranji changed cricket with a bucket.

From minor league baseball exploitation to spectator hooliganism, Sailofsky shows the connections between the business of sports and violence, but also, more importantly, he imagines new forms of sport that are not places of harm.

Tabletop games are ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because they're everywhere: played in bars and cafés, churches and casinos, through sunless winters in polar research stations and in the sweltering summer heat of Tanzanian villages and streamed live over Twitch to millions of viewers. And they're extraordinary for precisely the same reason: they're everywhere, in every civilization, everywhere in the world across all recorded human history. In Across the Board, tabletop game aficionado Tim Clare takes us through that history and across those civilizations.