Now, to mark the NHL's 99th anniversary, Wayne Gretzky has written the story of our game.No one has been as close to the game as Wayne Gretzky. When he first laced up skates in the NHL, he changed the league. And by the time he had hung up his skates, he had re-written the record book.There can be no doubt what he means to the game. What we haven't seen is what the game means to him. For the first time, Wayne Gretzky will tell us about the NHL's great moments from his point of view. We will meet the people who inspired him and motivated him. We'll read the stories of the players who ignited his imagination, just as Gretzky himself inspired the dreams of so many young players and fans.Seen through the eyes of the player whose name has come to stand for greatness in the game of hockey, 99: Stories of the Game brings to life the NHL's glorious past, from its fierce early battles on natural ice, through its mythical golden era, when the Howes and Richards, Hulls and Orrs defined greatness, through the unforgettable dynasties in Montreal, New York, and of course, Edmonton, through to the present day.Written with all the insight of someone who knows what it feels like when your lungs burn at the end of a long shift, and the pain of bruises at the end of a long playoff series, who knows what it feels like to fall short against a bitter rival, and also the incomparable feeling of lifting the Stanley Cup over your head, 99: Stories of the Game doesn't just tell the history of the NHL's 99 years. It relives them.

    For thirteen seasons, Avery played for some of the toughest, most storied franchises in the league, including the Detroit Red Wings, the Los Angeles Kings, and the New York Rangers, making his mark in each city as a player that was sometimes loved, often despised, but always controversial.In Ice Capades, Avery takes his trademark candidness about the world of pro hockey and does for it what Jim Bouton's game-changing Ball Four did for baseball. Avery goes deep inside the sport to reveal every aspect of an athlete's life, from what they do with their money and nights off to how they stay sharp and competitive in the league. While playing the talented villain in the NHL, Avery broke far away from his on-ice character in the off-season, and Ice Capades takes the reader inside the other unexpected and unprecedented roles that Avery inhabited—Vogue intern, fashion model, advertising executive, restauranteur, gay rights advocate, and many more.Love him or hate him, Sean Avery changed the way professional hockey is played today. Rollickingly honest and compelling throughout, Ice Capades transcends the "sports book" genre and offers a rare, unvarnished glimpse into the world of 21st century hockey through the eyes of one of its most original and memorable players.

    The legendary Hall-of-Fame outfielder was a national hero during his record-setting career with the New York Yankees, but public revelations of alcoholism, infidelity, and family strife badly tarnished the ballplayer's reputation in his latter years. In The Last Boy, Leavy plumbs the depths of the complex athlete, using copious first-hand research as well as her own memories, to show why The Mick remains the most beloved and misunderstood Yankee slugger of all time.

    But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball's immortal figures. Based on meticulous research and extensive interviews The Last Hero reveals how Aaron navigated the upheavals of his time - fighting against racism while at the same time benefiting from racial progress - and how he achieved his goal of continuing Jackie Robinson's mission to obtain full equality for African Americans, both in baseball and society, while he lived uncomfortably in the public eye. Eloquently written, detailed and penetrating, this is a revelatory portrait of a complicated, private man who through sports became an enduring American icon.

    A timeless baseball classic and a must read for any fan worthy of the name, Nine Innings dissects a single baseball game played in June 1982 -- inning by inning, play by play. Daniel Okrent, a seasoned writer and lifelong fan, chose as his subject a Milwaukee BrewersBaltimore Orioles matchup, though it could have been any game, because, as Okrent reveals, the essence of baseball, no matter where or when it's played, has been and will always be the same. In this particular moment of baseball history you will discover myriad aspects of the sport that are crucial to its nature but so often invisible to the fans -- the hidden language of catchers' signals, the physiology of pitching, the balance sheet of a club owner, the gait of a player stepping up to the plate. With the purity of heart and unwavering attention to detail that characterize our national pastime, Okrent goes straight to the core of the world's greatest game. You'll never watch baseball the same way again.

    The game was not televised; no New York sportswriters showed up; and a fourteen-year-old local boy ran onto the court when Chamberlain scored his hundredth point, shook his hand, and then ran off with the basketball. In telling the story of this remarkable night, author Gary M. Pomerantz brings to life a lost world of American sports.In 1962, the National Basketball Association, stepchild to the college game, was searching for its identity. Its teams were mostly white, the number of black players limited by an unspoken quota. Games were played in drafty, half-filled arenas, and the players traveled on buses and trains, telling tall tales, playing cards, and sometimes reading Joyce. Into this scene stepped the unprecedented Wilt Chamberlain: strong and quick-witted, voluble and enigmatic, a seven-footer who played with a colossal will and a dancer’s grace. That strength, will, grace, and mystery were never more in focus than on March 2, 1962. Pomerantz tracked down Knicks and Philadelphia Warriors, fans, journalists, team officials, other NBA stars of the era, and basketball historians, conducting more than 250 interviews in all, to recreate in painstaking detail the game that announced the Dipper’s greatness. He brings us to Hershey, Pennsylvania, a sweet-seeming model of the gentle, homogeneous small-town America that was fast becoming anachronistic. We see the fans and players, alternately fascinated and confused by Wilt, drawn anxiously into the spectacle. Pomerantz portrays the other legendary figures in this story: the Warriors’ elegant coach Frank McGuire; the beloved, if rumpled, team owner Eddie Gottlieb; and the irreverent p.a. announcer Dave “the Zink” Zinkoff, who handed out free salamis courtside.At the heart of the book is the self-made Chamberlain, a romantic cosmopolitan who owned a nightclub in Harlem and shrugged off segregation with a bebop cool but harbored every slight deep in his psyche. March 2, 1962, presented the awesome sight of Wilt Chamberlain imposing himself on a world that would diminish him. Wilt, 1962 is not only the dramatic story of a singular basketball game but a meditation on small towns, midcentury America, and one of the most intriguing figures in the pantheon of sports heroes. Also available as a Random House AudioBookFrom the Hardcover edition.

    Each year, the series editor and guest editor curates a truly exceptional collection. The only shared traits among all these diverse styles, voices, and stories are the extraordinarily high caliber of writing, and the pure passion they tap into that can only come from sports.

    And the moments are part of college basketball lore: the Sweater Game, Villanova Beats Georgetown, and Six Overtimes. But this is the story of the Big East Conference that you haven't heard before--of how the Northeast, once an afterthought, became the epicenter of college basketball.Before the league's founding, East Coast basketball had crowned just three national champions in forty years, and none since 1954. But in the Big East's first ten years, five of its teams played for a national championship. The league didn't merely inherit good teams; it created them. But how did this unlikely group of schools come to dominate college basketball so quickly and completely?Including interviews with more than sixty of the key figures in the conference's history, The Big East charts the league's daring beginnings and its incredible rise. It transports fans inside packed arenas to epic wars fought between transcendent players, and behind locker-room doors where combustible coaches battled even more fiercely for a leg up.Started on a handshake and a prayer, the Big East carved an improbable arc in sports history, an ensemble of Catholic schools banding together to not only improve their own stations but rewrite the geographic boundaries of basketball. As former UConn coach Jim Calhoun eloquently put it, "It was Camelot. Camelot with bad language."

    Flavored with wild (and often ribald) anecdotes, inside stories, interviews, and never-before-told material, Going Long brings the incredible story of the maverick American Football League to life through the words of those who lived it.

    Fans who politely return foul balls. This witty and incisive book by the author of the acclaimed The Chrysanthemum and the Bat gives us an unprecedented look at Japanese baseball, as seen by baffled Americans from Babe Ruth to Willie Smith. Black-and-white photographs.

    Eliot Asinof has reconstructed the entire scene-by-scene story of the fantastic scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players arranged with the nation's leading gamblers to throw the Series in Cincinnati. Mr. Asinof vividly describes the tense meetings, the hitches in the conniving, the actual plays in which the Series was thrown, the Grand Jury indictment, and the famous 1921 trial. Moving behind the scenes, he perceptively examines the motives and backgrounds of the players and the conditions that made the improbable fix all too possible. Here, too, is a graphic picture of the American underworld that managed the fix, the deeply shocked newspapermen who uncovered the story, and the war-exhausted nation that turned with relief and pride to the Series, only to be rocked by the scandal. Far more than a superbly told baseball story, this is a compelling slice of American history in the aftermath of World War I and at the cusp of the Roaring Twenties.

    He survives a game against the Philadelphia Flyers relaticely unscathed - and brings back this memorable portrait of the rough-and-tumble world of professional hockey.

     What does it take to drop ten strokes from your golf score? What part of Tiger Woods’ game makes him a winner? Traditional golf stats can't answer these questions. Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, helped the PGA Tour develop its cutting-edge strokes gained putting stat. In this eye-opening new book, Broadie uses analytics from the financial world to uncover the secrets of the game of golf. He crunches mountains of data to show both professional and amateur golfers how to make better decisions on the course.  This eagerly awaited resource is for any player who wants to understand the pros, improve golf skills, and make every shot count.

    16 pages of photos.

    He ended up staying the entire summer, becoming part of the players’ lives, and eventually the coach of a loose aggregation known as the Subway Stars. Telander tells of everything he saw: the on-court flash, the off-court jargon, the late-night graffiti raids, the tireless efforts of one promoter-hustler-benefactor to get these kids a chance at a college education. He lets the kids speak for themselves, revealing their grand dreams and ambitions, but he never flinches from showing us how far their dreams are from reality. The roots of today’s inner-city basketball can be traced to the world Telander presents in Heaven Is a Playground, the first book of its kind.