Showing titles in Sports History

In 1967, a Cleveland businessman had a brilliant idea: Why not start a women's football team? It was conceived as a gimmick and a publicity stunt in the vein of the Harlem Globetrotters. He recruited women to compete as a traveling football troupe; much to his surprise, he learned that women really wanted to play — and play hard. Hail Mary is the story of the unlikely rise of the National Women's Football League and the players who loved a game that society told them they shouldn't be playing.

Throughout the NCAA Tournament’s history, underdogs, Cinderella stories, and upsets have captured the attention and imagination of fans. Making March Madness is the story of this premiere tournament, from its early days in Kansas City, to its move to Madison Square Garden, to its surviving a point-shaving scandal in New York and taking its games to different sites across the country.

William Barclay "Bat" Masterson spent the first half of his adult life in the West, planting the seeds for his later legend as he moved from Texas to Kansas and then Colorado. In Denver, his gambling habit and combative nature drew him to the still-developing sport of prizefighting. Masterson attended almost every important match in the United States from the 1880s to 1921, first as a professional gambler betting on the bouts, and later as a promoter and referee. Ultimately, Bat stumbled into writing about the sport.

From reflecting on his early years at his local pitch and putt to his stellar career playing against the best of the best on the greatest courses on the planet, Golf is Hard takes you inside the world of professional golf like no book before it, sharing side-splitting and painfully honest stories of life behind the scenes as a tour pro.

The Paris-Roubaix bicycle race, nicknamed "The Hell of the North," is famous for sending riders over brutal cobblestone roads. Only the strong, brave and lucky survive the hours of bone-shaking racing without suffering some mishap or catastrophe. It is so difficult no one wins it by accident, and winning Paris-Roubaix automatically puts a rider among the immortals of the sport. Why did Paris-Roubaix emerge to be such a special race? Les Woodland tells the inside story of one of cycling's classics.

Before he made a name for himself as an acclaimed essayist and nature writer, David Gessner devoted his 20s to a cultish sport called Ultimate Frisbee. Like his teammates and rivals, he trained for countless hours, sacrificing his body and potential career for a chance at fleeting glory without fortune or fame. His only goal: to win Nationals and go down in Ultimate history as one of the greatest athletes no one has ever heard of.

The glory years for the Toronto Maple Leafs—four Stanley Cups in the 1960s—may be distant memories, but what the team lacks in recent accomplishments is made up for by their history, which is rich in drama, pathos, and, most of all, humor. Figures connected to the Maple Leafs from the 1950s to the present offer their best stories, including some new takes on the team’s legends

The basketball rivalry between Duke and North Carolina is the fiercest and longest-running blood feud in college athletics, and perhaps in all of sports. To legions of otherwise reasonable adults, it is a conflict that surpasses athletics; it is rich against poor, locals against outsiders, even good against evil. In North Carolina, where both schools reside, it is a way of aligning oneself with larger philosophic ideals—of choosing teams in life—a tradition of partisanship that reveals the pleasures and even the necessities of hatred.

Every sports fan recalls with amazing accuracy a pivotal winning moment involving a favorite team or player - Henry Aaron hitting his 715th home run to pass Babe Ruth, Christian Laettner's famous buzzer-beating shot in the NCAA tournament for Duke. Yet lost are the stories on the other side of these history-making moments, the athletes who experienced not transcendent glory but crushing disappointment: the cornerback who missed the tackle on the big touchdown, the relief pitcher who lost the series, the world-record holding Olympian who fell on the ice.

In celebration of the Women’s Tennis Association’s 50th anniversary, this updated and expanded edition—based on the 1988 original We Have Come a Long Way: The Story of Women's Tennis—includes more than 33 years’ worth of stories about inspiring women and their achievements. The book arrives 53 years after King and eight other women players broke with the male tennis establishment and launched their own professional tour.

A Nigerian native who emigrated to the United States at age 11, Alex Owumi's exploits on the basketball court earned him a college scholarship to Georgetown University. Undrafted by the NBA, Owumi pursued his basketball dream overseas, eventually signing with Al-Nasr of Libya, a state-run athletic club privately funded by the family of Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi.

Thirty-nine stories of hockey players who only scored one goal in their entire NHL career. From guys nobody has heard of to star goalies who managed to get one in the net, Ken Reid interviews these NHLers and finds out what that single point meant in the grand scheme of their lives.

In this concise social history of golf in the United States from the 1880s to the present, George B. Kirsch tracks the surprising growth of golf as a popular, mainstream sport, in contrast to the stereotype of golf as a pastime enjoyed only by the rich elite.While golf retains a strong association with upper-class, male-dominated, socially exclusive country clubs, it has also boasted a dedicated following among Americans from different social classes, ethnic backgrounds, races, and genders.

Matt Warshaw knows more about surfing than any other person on the planet, as evidenced by The History of Surfing, Warshaw's definitive take on the sport. Now he has honed that book into an abridged and excerpted edition for surfers everywhere. Each spread features a micro essay alongside an image capturing a slice of surf history, from Kelly Slater and the invention of the thruster to shark attacks and localism. A Brief History of Surfing deftly defines surf culture in an entertaining and irresistible volume with wide appeal.

From the day Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869, these major schools of the northeast - Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale - shaped football as we now know it. In this rich history, Bernstein shows that much of the culture that surrounds American football, both good and bad, has its roots in the Ivy League.

What started with a bunch of gangly teens playing ball on a plowed wheat field has become one of the most exciting powerhouses in college football history. Fans of this raucous and indomitable team get to relive all the great moments with this revised edition of Tales from the Virginia Tech Sideline. Virginia Tech alum and former editor of the Hokie Huddler Chris Colston shares the school’s greatest football stories and anecdotes. From the days of Miles Stadium to Beamerball, fans will recapture all the excitement of the most well known games.

Each week, when Sports Illustrated's 21 million readers open up their magazine, many turn right to the last page - because that's where to find SI's most popular feature: the Life of Reilly column, written by best-selling author Rick Reilly. This new collection includes 100 of Reilly's favorite columns from the last six years, along with an introduction by Lance Armstrong.

Hockey Card Stories reveals what was really going on in your favorite old hockey cards through the eyes of the players depicted on them. Some of the cards are definitely worth a few bucks, some a few cents - but every story told here is priceless. Sportsnet's Ken Reid presents the cards you loved and the airbrushed monstrosities that made you howl, the cards that have been packed away in boxes forever, and others you can't believe ever existed.

These days, swimming may seem like the most egalitarian of pastimes, open to anyone with a swimsuit - but this wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, swimming was exclusively the domain of men, and access to pools was a luxury limited by class. Women were (barely) allowed to swim in the sea, as long as no men were around, but even into the 20th century they could be arrested and fined if they dared dive into a lake. It wasn't until the 1930s that women were finally granted equal access.

Set against the backdrop of the first world's fair in London, America's Victory takes listeners into a world rich in adventure and history in an unforgettable story of skill, daring, and honor at the heart of our national identity