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The countdown
Observer Sport Monthly
26) Muhammad Ali by Thomas Hauser (1991)While Parkinson's disease strengthened its cruel grip over Ali, Hauser spoke to more than 200 of his acquaintances, including friends and family, opponents and former United States Presidents to recreate the true image of the irrepressible world heavyweight champion. A frank, touching and absorbing discussion of perhaps the greatest sportsman of the 20th century.27) A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein (1986)The season is 198586 and the man on the brink is Bobby Knight, the tempestuous coach of a college basketball team, the Indiana Hoosiers. Feinstein enjoys complete access to the Hoosiers and is caught in the middle of the fierce rivalries and loyalties of the sport. Outraged and outrageous, upbeat one minute and horrific the next, Knight emerges as one whose approach to man management makes Fergie's hairdryer treatment seem like a lot of hot air.28) The Golf Omnibus by PG Wodehouse (1973)Robert McCrum writes:
PG Wodehouse was a lifelong sports fan. So Wodehouse took up golf. Everyone said he was terrible, but he didn't mind. He liked the exercise, he said. Being a duffer was inspiration enough: 'Every night before he went to bed he would read the golden words of some master on the subject of putting, driving, or approaching. His first collection, The Clicking of Cuthbert, appeared in 1922. This was followed in 1926 by The Heart of a Goof, a volume that contains the famous sentence 'It was a morning when all nature shouted "Fore!" 'To some admirers the best of his golfing stories (The Salvation of George Mackintosh, Sundered Hearts, The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh, The Coming of Gowf and The Clicking of Cuthbert) are among his finest work. Like all his best work, the golf stories are not only examples of great comic writing; they are also written from an intimate, even profound, love and understanding of the game. And yet well, I suppose it amounts to that.' 'I don't quite understand.' 'Well the fact is,[url=http://www.sport.fr/economie/airmax.html]air max hommes[/url],' said Celia, in a burst of girlish frankness, 'I rather think I've killed George.' 'Killed him, eh ?' 'I killed him with my niblick.' I nodded. 'Boxing,' McIlvanney writes, 'with all its ambiguities, offers in its best moments a thrill as pure and basic as a heartbeat.' At the same time, however, the death of Welsh boxer Johnny Owen, the appalling injuries suffered by Michael Watson and the condition of Ali in his senescence force him to question his love of the fight game.30) Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof (1963)Like the attack on Pearl Harbour or the Kennedy assassinations, the revelation that members of the Chicago White Sox accepted bribes to throw the 1919 World Series is often cited as one of the moments when 20thcentury America lost its innocence. Talking to the key characters, Asinof reconstructs the most shocking scandal in American sport. The book was made into a film in 1988.31) Anyone but England: Cricket and the National Malaise by Mike Marqusee (1994)Marqusee may be an American socialist, but he lives in England now and is also a lover of cricket. He is outraged at how race and class have influenced the English game. He argues the case that the English cricket establishment has now sold its soul to big business having for so long dismissed the aspirations of professional players, and that it resisted the rise of black and Asian cricket (both in England and internationally) while offering the hand of friendship to their white brethren in apartheidera South Africa. The verdict? Guilty.32) Endless Winter by Stephen Jones (1993)The 199293 rugby season was bookended by the return of the Springboks to the international fold and the Lions tour to New Zealand. In between fell a Five Nations tournament in which all the teams posed a genuine threat to one another. Off the pitch, there was quite a bit going on, too. The lucre offered by rugby league could still lure away union stars, although an encroaching commercialism heralded the advent of professionalism. The Rugby Football Union were stuck in the middle, vainly struggling to maintain their grip on the game. Jones's acerbic take on events presaged the turmoil that followed the beginnings of professional union two years later and won him the William Hill prize.33) The Football Man by Arthur Hopcraft (1968)Written shortly after England's World Cup victory, Hopcraft's book was the first attempt to place the national game in a social and cultural as well as sporting context. Hopcraft hailed the new breed of workingclass professionals, exemplified by George Best, who were, in the postmaximum wage era, finally enjoying the riches of their labour. The swelling thunder of the crowd, the mixture of the graceful and the frantic on the field, the deeplying involvement in the game on the part of the spectator, all insist on a florid content in the prose.'34) Basil D'Oliveira by Peter Oborne (2004)Peter Oborne:
D'Oliveira was a childhood hero of mine. Even before I saw him play I was drawn to him, if only because of his name. Compared with Geoff Boycott, John Edrich and MJK Smith, it had an exotic ring to it. I was only 11 when he scored that century in the last Test of the summer at The Oval in 1968, but I can't forget following his progress during that innings. Up until then he had had a wretched season and I felt wretched for him. But here he was, scoring the most glorious century for England and guaranteeing his place on the tour to South Africa, the country of his birth. I can remember Denis Compton arguing against his selection; Compton had a South African wife. I felt outraged. It's important to state how critical those events were in bringing home to the conservative, English middle class just how abhorrent apartheid was. Up until then, most people had dismissed what went on in South Africa as something that didn't concern them. When I went to Pretoria to look at the public records, it was apparent that there had been worried communications between the South African and British governments before the squad was due to be announced and that these had been passed on to the MCC. It would have been easy for Doug to have avoided me but he was prepared to account for his actions and that does him much credit. The one key actor I couldn't meet was Colin Cowdrey, who died shortly before I began the book. Basil looked up to Cowdrey not just as a captain, but as a player and as a man. For his part, Cowdrey said he would resist the pressure and back his selection. But the fact is, he didn't. Even now Basil can't quite believe that Cowdrey betrayed him. Peter Oborne won the 2004 William Hill prize for Basil D'Oliveira (Little Brown)35) Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King by Jack Newfield (1995)At the time of publication, King was the untouched emperor of heavyweight boxing and, while it was widely acknowledged that the emperor had no morals, his career path from hoodlum and huckster to kingmaker had passed virtually unmentioned, particularly by anyone with ambitions in the world of boxing. Then came Newfield. Winner traces the origins of that tradition as it began with Cruyff and his teammates in the late Sixties. The emergence of 'total football' unique to Holland becomes inextricably linked to the Dutch national character and its concern with space, expression and artistry.37) Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage (1990)This was the first book by a professional cyclist to confront the drugs issue blighting the sport. Kimmage was bitter about his chosen sport and decided to name the guilty parties, to explain how and why drugs were taken, as well as conceding that he too once took amphetamines to improve his performance. His career may have been overshadowed by the success of Irish compatriots Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, but in this book he left us with an impressive and damning indictment of the sport's governing body, the UCI.38) Dark Trade by Donald McRae (1996)What began as a celebration of boxing ends with McRae pondering: 'How many men did I have to see maimed and killed to reach a coherent conclusion which could shut a book?' This fiveyear journey in the company of Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Frank Bruno, Michael Watson and James 'Lights Out' Toney (to whom McRae grows close, even walking to the ring with him before one fight) is moving and insightful. But it is McRae's own fears about being in thrall to boxing that make this book truly memorable.39) Harold Gimblett, tormented genius of cricket by David Foot (1982)A swashbuckling batsman otherwise known as the Bicknoller Biffer, after his birthplace Gimblett was entertaining the Somerset faithful with his aggressive hitting a couple of generations before IT Botham and played three Tests for England in the late 1930s before the Second World War interrupted his career. Unfortunately, he was also a manic depressive who would be admitted to a psychiatric unit for electroconvulsant therapy and committed suicide in 1978 at the age of 63. Foot's biography contrasts the merry confidence of his batting with the insecure introspection that consumed him beyond the boundary.40) Little Girls in Pretty Boxes by Joan Ryan (1996)There have been many investigations into the state of sports over the years, but few as excoriating as Joan Ryan's attack on the politics of gymnastics and ice skating. Ryan conducted exhaustive interviews with the parents of teenage gymnasts and skaters, their coaches and the judges. Her conclusion, that they were all, to a degree, guilty of manipulating and abusing their charges, is a powerful one, but it is the haunting interviews with the girls themselves from Bela Karoli's protege, Dominique Moceanu, burnt out at 15, to the anorexic Christy Heinrich that are most memorable.41) True Blue by Dan Topolski (1989)Dan Topolski:
When I look back on the events behind the book mutiny of five Americans who walked out of the 1987 Oxford crew when Topolski was the head coach days before the boat race leaving him to field a scratched together team it seems like a dream. I don't think there was anything I could have done differently. Even the American coaches I know said those particular people were ridiculously bloodyminded. At the time, no one would have thought that Oxford could go on to win the race. The book succeeds, I think, and was later made into a film, because Oxford's victory was such a surprise. What happened was such a good story and seems to appeal to people who have no interest in rowing and even less in university politics. Lionel 'Train' Walk is a brilliant golfer but his colour bars him from using his talent; when his world collides with that of San Diego detective Millard Packard, the scene is set for a brutal noirish tale, which, while bleak, is never entirely without hope of redemption.43) A Season in Verona by Tim Parks (2003)Parks is best known as a novelist his Europa was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1997 but his footballwriting is not fiction. This account of Hellas Verona's battle to stay in Serie A during the 200001 season (they avoided relegation by one point) is used to support his contention that football is a refl ection of the Italian national condition. Parks's portrayal of his fellow diehard supporters, the Brigate Giallobl? prone to paranoia, sensitive to the grace of the beautiful game but also brutally racist serves as a reminder that the word fan is short for fanatic. In the course of the season, Parks moves from the status of disapproving observer of the Giallobl? 'the yellow and blue', after the team's colours to semidetached participant.44) Close of Play by Neville Cardus (1956) Andrew Bull writes:
Many thousands watch a day's play of a Test match, yet no one else would see what Cardus saw. When he began to write about cricket most reporters wrote spare, parched descriptions of the play. But he was inimitable: mostly, they confused his high style for cod poetics. He grew up among the city's theatres and concert halls as well as the sixpenny seats at Lancashire CCC. He watched Archie MacLaren bat by day and Sir Henry Irving act by night, and between the two he honed his distinctive eye as a critic. Through cricket Cardus found the humour of our national and regional character. Players' performances were to him bound up in the hopes and frustrations of the crowds they played for. At a time when tens of thousands would attend the Roses match he found in grounds a fuller reflection of the mood and character of the English than could be found anywhere else. 'To go to a cricket ground for nothing but cricket,' he wrote, 'is as to go to an inn for nothing but drink.'Cardus, who died in 1975, saw sport less as pure competition than as a means of revealing character. Where others looked at spinners, seamers and batsmen, he saw folk heroes, comics and tragedians. Only a fraction of those who claim to have seen Denis Compton bat have done so, fewer still witnessed one of his great innings, yet his effortless grace is the stuff of legend. Why? The answer has much to do with Cardus. Inglis's audit examined grounds at a time when, much like the football, they were at their ramshackle worst, yet found much to treasure. While doing so, he also captured the football and social history unique to each. Inglis, who has revised the book regularly, later sat on the body that laid down the standards for rebuilding grounds in the wake of the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster.46) Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)This 900page novel begins with one of the most celebrated moments in baseball: Bobby Thomson's winning strike, the 'shot heard round the world', that gave the New York Giants the 1951 National League pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers. In this extravagant and often astonishing book, DeLillo imagines what might have happened to the ball after it disappeared into the crowd, how it was passed through different hands and down the generations, so that, in the end, it becomes less a baseball than an extended metaphor for the disturbed and complicated postwar history of America itself.47) The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino, with Paul Kimmage (2000)Few players embodied the vigorous approach of Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland better than Tony Cascarino. And yet, as this book revealed, Cascarino was not Irish. He qualified to play for the Republic through his maternal grandmother and had won 66 caps by the time he discovered that his mother had been adopted. He was not qualified to play for Ireland, after all. But he kept quiet, making another 22 appearances for a country to which he had no blood ties. Meanwhile, he was enjoying a late revival of his club career in France, but his personal life was in turmoil. That should not, however, prevent them from reading Alison Kennedy's elegantly written book. What makes it worthy of inclusion here is its style and seriousness of purpose. Using the sport's ancient rituals of Corrida the dance between beast and man as her starting point, she shows us bullfighting in its beauty and in its pain. Rejecting the macho posturing of Ernest Hemingway, Kennedy both illuminates and criticises the ritual, concluding that it is 'an elaborately prepared transgression, a sacrifice and a sin, ugly and peculiarly moving'.49) Walking on Water by Andy Martin (1991)Andy Martin is an unlikely convert to surfing's world of crashing waves, golden beaches and cooldude slang. He was hooked and stoked in one. The Prof of Surf goes to Hawaii to unlock the thrill of the Pipeline 'like being chased down the street by a house' and returns an evangelist. This is the most elegant of love letters.50) The Far Corner by Harry Pearson (1995)Why does the northeast occupy a unique place in English football? Is it the unrivalled passion of its fans, the narrow but epic failure of its clubs to miss out on the big prizes, or the fact that, in an area blighted by economic depression, football alone stitches together its social fabric? Pearson spent the 199394 season travelling the region's grounds, from tiny Langley Park to St James' Park, attempting to answer these questions. A Middlesbrough fan with a nice line in gags, Pearson has also written a cultural history of Belgium and an appreciation of country fairs in the north of England. Observer readers can enjoy an exclusive 20 per cent discount on sports books at Borders, sponsors of the OSM Top 50 Sports Books list.