Best of
Sports

1969

Levels of the Game


John McPhee - 1969
    McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games.

The Revolt of the Black Athlete


Harry Edwards - 1969
    This Fiftieth Anniversary edition of Harry Edwards's classic of activist scholarship arrives even as a new generation engages with the issues he explored. Edwards's new introduction and afterword revisit the revolts by athletes like Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. At the same time, he engages with the struggles of a present still rife with racism, double-standards, and economic injustice. Again relating the rebellion of black athletes to a larger spirit of revolt among black citizens, Edwards moves his story forward to our era of protests, boycotts, and the dramatic politicization of athletes by Black Lives Matter. Incisive yet ultimately hopeful, The Revolt of the Black Athlete is the still-essential study of the conflicts at the interface of sport, race, and society.

Fat City


Leonard Gardner - 1969
    It tells the story of two young boxers out of Stockton, California: Ernie Munger and Billy Tully, one in his late teens, the other just turning thirty, whose seemingly parallel lives intersect for a time. Set in an ambiance of glittering dreams and drab realities, it tells of the two fighters' struggles to escape the confinements of their existence, and of the men and women in their world. Fat City is a novel about the sporting life like no other ever written: without melodrama or false heroics, written with a truthfulness that is at once painful and beautiful.Denis Johnson: "Between the ages of 19 and 25 I studied Leonard Gardner’s book so closely that I began to fear I’d never be able to write anything but imitations of it, so I swore it off(...)When I was about 34 (the same age Gardner was when he published his), my first novel came out. About a year later I borrowed Fat City from the library and read it. I could see immediately that ten years’ exile hadn’t saved me from the influence of its perfection — I’d taught myself to write in Gardner’s style, though not as well. And now, many years later, it’s still true: Leonard Gardner has something to say in every word I write."Joan Didion: "Leonard Gardner's Fat City affected me more than any new fiction I have read in a long while, and I do not think it affected me only because I come from Fat City, or somewhere near it. He has got it exactly right--the hanging around gas stations, the field dust, the relentless oppressiveness of the weather, the bleak liaisons sealed on the levees and Greyhound buses--but he has done more than just get it down, he has made it a metaphor for the joyless in heart."David Wagoner: "The people he writes about are alive and three-dimensional, and have that meaty, sweaty immediacy I admire in novels and find so seldom. It's an odd, interesting world he explores here--as tense and vivid as the prose."Ivan Gold: "Gardner writes with power, with an insider's knowledge, and with a vividness and love for his characters which redeem them even when they're lost and beaten."Harry Mark Petrakis: "A man of real talent. He makes the savage world he writes of come alive to the point where the reader can smell the sweat, and feel the anguish of unremitting failure."Ross Macdonald: "In his pity and art Gardner moves beyond race, beyond guilt and punishment, as Twain and Melville did, into a tragic forgiveness. I have seldom read a novel as beautiful and individual as this one."Originally published in 1969, Fat City is an American classic whose stature has increased over the years. Made into an acclaimed film by John Huston, the book is set in and around Stockton, California.

My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life


Ted Williams - 1969
     An acclaimed best-seller, My Turn at Bat now features new photographs and, for the first time, Ted's reflections on his managing career and the state of baseball as it is played in the 1980s. It's all here in this brilliant, honest and sometimes angry autobiography -- Williams' childhood days in San Diego, his military service, his unforgettable major league baseball debut and ensuing Hall of Fame career that included two Triple Crowns, two Most Valuable Player awards, six batting championships, five Sporting News awards as Major League Player of the Year, 521 lifetime homeruns and a .344 career batting average. And Williams tells his side of the controversies, from his battles with sportswriters and Boston fans to his single World Series performance and his career with the declining Red Sox of the 1950s. My Turn at Bat belongs in the library of everyone who loves Ted Williams, baseball, or great life stories well-told. Red Barber proclaimed My Turn at Bat to be: "One of the best baseball books I've ever read." John Leonard of The New York Times said My Turn at Bat was "unbuttoned and wholly engaging...the portrait of an original who is unrepentant about being better than anyone else."

How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time


Tommy Armour - 1969
    Tommy Armour's classic How to Play Your Best Golf All the Time provides timeless golf instruction on the following subjects: * How to learn your best golf * What can your best golf be? * Taking you to the lesson tee * How your clubs can help you * The grip holds your swing together * How to get ready to swing * Footwork, the foundation of best golf * The art of hitting with the hands * The waggle, preliminary swing in miniature * The pause that means good timing * Assembling your game in good order * Saving strokes with simple approach shots * The fascinating, frustrating philosophy of putting * The simple routine of an orderly golf shot These classic bits of advice are accompanied by over four dozen two-color illustrations.

The Greatest Game of All: My Life in Golf


Jack Nicklaus - 1969
    He was already the best golfer in the world and he felt he had a wonderful story to tell, and he did. What he did not know is that he would go on to win another eleven major championships before he was through. A marvelous book complete with golf instruction. Foreword by Robert Tyre Jones, Jr

Mr. Clutch: The Jerry West story


Jerry West - 1969
    He is, in the words of Bill Libby, "too short, too this, too frail, too easily hurt to be a star in the madcap mayhem that is professional basketball. He is too modest, too nervous, too moody to take charge of a team, to stand up under the pressure of this gruelling game. A poor hillbilly kid who is authentically modest, 'sirs' strangers and is respectful even to sportswriters, he is a most unlikely athletic hero."

Hockey! The Story of the World's Fastest Sport


Stan Fischler - 1969
    

Road to Olympus


Anatoly Tarasov - 1969
    He helped introduce the Canadian version of hockey into the Soviet Union in 1946 and, eight years later, his team won the international amateur hockey championship. He adapted the Russian version of hockey, which at that time resembled outdoor soccer on ice, to the style that is played indoors on smaller rinks. He then defeated the Canadians and Americans at their own game.

Professional Baseball the First 100 Years


Major League Baseball - 1969
    

The Baseball Encyclopedia: The Complete and Official Record of Major League Baseball


Joseph L. Reichler - 1969
    

Two-Wheeled Thunder


William G. Gault - 1969
    Book by Gault, William G.

Lionel Rose, Australian


Lionel Rose - 1969
    of plates : ill., ports.