It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin's left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake-hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.

Hall of Fame football coach Jimmy Johnson’s house isn’t on the way to anything. Yet, his private sanctuary on the Florida Keys’ Islamorada islands is a popular destination to which college and professional coaches, general managers, and team owners regularly trek to seek advice—how to build a positive team culture, draft elite players, balance work and family life, and lead a team to win. Why? Because Jimmy Johnson has done it all. Now, written with sports journalist Dave Hyde, Johnson shares a candid account of his life experiences that have turned him into a legend in the coaching world.

The United States Football League was the last football league to not merely challenge the mighty NFL but also to cause it to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, featured as many as 18 teams, secured multiple television deals, drew millions of fans, and launched the careers of legends - but then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner, a New York businessman named Donald Trump. Jeff Pearlman draws on more than 400 interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America.

At five feet ten inches tall, running back Walter Payton was not the largest player in the NFL, but he developed a larger-than-life reputation for his strength, speed, and grit. Nicknamed “Sweetness” during his college football days, he became the NFL’s all-time leader in rushing and all-purpose yards, capturing the hearts of fans in his adopted Chicago.

Best-selling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost 300 interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era. A dazzling account of one of America’s greatest sports sagas, Showtime is packed with indelible characters, vicious rivalries, and jaw-dropping, behind-the-scenes stories of the players’ decadent Hollywood lifestyles. From the Showtime era’s remarkable rise to its tragic end - marked by Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement that he had contracted HIV - Showtime is a gripping narrative of sports, celebrity, and 1980s-style excess.

How was the Patriots dynasty built? And how did it last for two decades? In The Dynasty, acclaimed journalist Jeff Benedict provides richly reported answers in a sweeping account based on exclusive interviews with more than 200 insiders - including team executives, coaches, players, players’ wives, team doctors, lawyers, and more - as well as never-before-seen recordings, documents, and electronic communications.

The definitive history of the 1990s New York Knicks, illustrating how Pat Riley, Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason resurrected the iconic franchise through oppressive physicality and unmatched grit. Blood in the Garden is a portrait filled with eye-opening details that have never been shared before, revealing the full story of the franchise in the midst of the NBA’s golden era. And rest assured, no punches will be pulled. Which is just how those rough-and-tumble Knicks would like it.

The 25th anniversary edition of the number-one New York Times best seller and Sports Illustrated's best football book of all time, with a new afterword by the author. Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa - the winningest high school football team in Texas history.

In the history of modern sport, there have never been two high-level teammates who loathed each other the way Shaquille O’Neal loathed Kobe Bryant and Kobe Bryant loathed Shaquille O’Neal. From public sniping and sparring, to physical altercations and the repeated threats of trade, it was warfare. And yet, despite eight years of infighting and hostility, by turns mediated and encouraged by coach Phil Jackson, the Shaq-Kobe duo resulted in one of the greatest dynasties in NBA history.

Gunslinger tells Brett Favre's full, definitive story for the first time, drawing on more than 500 interviews, including many from the people closest to Favre. Jeff Pearlman charts Favre's journey, from his rough rural childhood and lackluster high school football career to landing the last roster spot at Southern Mississippi to a late-night car accident that nearly took his life. Favre clawed back, getting drafted into the NFL, first to Atlanta, then to Green Bay, where he restored the Packers to greatness and inspired a fan base as passionate as any in the game.

The definitive biography of a legendary athlete. The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball - hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, this scion of a complex family from North Carolina's Coastal Plain has a darker side: He's a ruthless competitor and a lover of high stakes. There's never been a biography that encompassed the dual nature of his character and looked so deeply at Jordan on and off the court - until now.

Over two unbelievable decades, the New England Patriots were not only the NFL's most dominant team, but also - and by far - the most secretive. How did they achieve and sustain greatness - and what were the costs? In It's Better to Be Feared, Seth Wickersham, one of the country's finest long form and investigative sportswriters, tells the full, behind-the-scenes story of the Patriots, capturing the brilliance, ambition, and vanity that powered and ultimately unraveled them.

Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports -- told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.

Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries, there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s. Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for The Boston Globe who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to1986. It was a time when reporters travelled with professional teams—flying the same commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same hotels. Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences, Shaughnessy takes us inside the legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams.

He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large. Yet few people know the real Charles. Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked about icons in the world of sports.

It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin's left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake-hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.

In the history of modern sport, there have never been two high-level teammates who loathed each other the way Shaquille O’Neal loathed Kobe Bryant and Kobe Bryant loathed Shaquille O’Neal. From public sniping and sparring, to physical altercations and the repeated threats of trade, it was warfare. And yet, despite eight years of infighting and hostility, by turns mediated and encouraged by coach Phil Jackson, the Shaq-Kobe duo resulted in one of the greatest dynasties in NBA history.

Best-selling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost 300 interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era. A dazzling account of one of America’s greatest sports sagas, Showtime is packed with indelible characters, vicious rivalries, and jaw-dropping, behind-the-scenes stories of the players’ decadent Hollywood lifestyles. From the Showtime era’s remarkable rise to its tragic end - marked by Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement that he had contracted HIV - Showtime is a gripping narrative of sports, celebrity, and 1980s-style excess.

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.

Gunslinger tells Brett Favre's full, definitive story for the first time, drawing on more than 500 interviews, including many from the people closest to Favre. Jeff Pearlman charts Favre's journey, from his rough rural childhood and lackluster high school football career to landing the last roster spot at Southern Mississippi to a late-night car accident that nearly took his life. Favre clawed back, getting drafted into the NFL, first to Atlanta, then to Green Bay, where he restored the Packers to greatness and inspired a fan base as passionate as any in the game.

The United States Football League was the last football league to not merely challenge the mighty NFL but also to cause it to collectively shudder. It spanned three seasons, featured as many as 18 teams, secured multiple television deals, drew millions of fans, and launched the careers of legends - but then it died beneath the weight of a particularly egotistical and bombastic owner, a New York businessman named Donald Trump. Jeff Pearlman draws on more than 400 interviews to unearth all the salty, untold stories of one of the craziest sports entities to have ever captivated America.

Hall of Fame football coach Jimmy Johnson’s house isn’t on the way to anything. Yet, his private sanctuary on the Florida Keys’ Islamorada islands is a popular destination to which college and professional coaches, general managers, and team owners regularly trek to seek advice—how to build a positive team culture, draft elite players, balance work and family life, and lead a team to win. Why? Because Jimmy Johnson has done it all. Now, written with sports journalist Dave Hyde, Johnson shares a candid account of his life experiences that have turned him into a legend in the coaching world.

We are living in the Wild West of college sports. Name, Image and Likeness endorsements, the transfer portal, collectives, conference realignment, the powerful influence of media companies have all rendered the notion of amateur athletics a quaint relic of the past, replaced by a Brave New World where money and self-interest rule. The Price is a sweeping, in-depth, thought-provoking look at an inflection point in big-time college football.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

After his bestselling home run books Why We Love Baseball and The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski turns from the national pastime to the number one sport in America. Why We Love Football is Posnanski’s newest must-have deep dive into the archives and legends of the sport, and the result is a rousing tale of the 100 greatest moments in football lore. This is the best kind of sports writing. Entertaining, enlightening, heartbreaking, hilarious, and always fascinating, these stories of the sport offer a panoramic look across its history.

Yahoo's lead baseball columnist offers an in-depth look at the most valuable commodity in sports - the pitching arm - and how its vulnerability to injury is hurting players and the game, from Little League to the majors.

This is a story about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a story by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is the story about what happened to the team when their glory days were behind them.

Sports Illustrated's chief NBA writer, Jack McCallum, only planned to spend the preseason with the Phoenix Suns as an "assistant coach" - and then write a story about his experiences. Instead, he stayed on with the Suns throughout their exciting and controversial 2005-2006 season. Gaining access to everything from locker-room chats with superstar point guard Steve Nash, to coaches' meetings with maverick coach Mike D'Antoni, McCallum learned what makes this wildly popular, innovative, and international assemblage of talented players and brilliant coaches tick.

In Five Banners, Feinstein tells the inside history of Coach K’s forty-two-year career at Duke and its five NCAA championships, from the first, against Kansas in 1991, to the most recent, in 2015 against Wisconsin. With unparalleled access to Coach K, the team, and its staff, Feinstein takes listeners on a mesmerizing ride into the locker room and onto the court. Full of intimate details, personal memories, and previously untold on- and off-court stories, it is a book that only Feinstein could write.

Long before the Moneyball Era, the Earl of Baltimore reigned over baseball. History’s feistiest and most colorful manager, Earl Weaver transformed the sport by collecting and analyzing data in visionary ways, ultimately winning more games than anybody else during his time running the Orioles from 1968 to 1982. When Weaver was hired by the Orioles, managers were still seen as coaches and inspirational leaders, more teachers of the game than strategists. Weaver invented new ways of building baseball teams, prioritizing on-base average, elite defense, and strike throwing.