# Between us, can we actually name ten great sports novels?



## Andre Jute (Dec 18, 2010)

Trad publishing has always regarded sports novels much like the pox. But are they right, are sports novels some kind of a contradiction in terms? Or are there great sports novels out there?

What actually enters my mind first is William Goldman's Marathon Man, where the lead character is a runner, inspired in life by a great Olympic runner. That's not a sports novel, that's a spy/Nazi/heist thriller. It's an example of what we don't want.

So, between us, can we come up with a list of ten great sports novels? I'll go first with the obvious one.

1. Bernard Malamud, The Natural, baseball


----------



## Geoffrey (Jun 20, 2009)

2. Richard Peck, _Something for Joey_, football


----------



## Gastro Detective (Feb 17, 2011)

Brock Yates: Cannonball Run


----------



## JD Rhoades (Feb 18, 2011)

Peter Gent, NORTH DALLAS FORTY (football).

Dan Jenkins, SEMI-TOUGH and LIFE ITS OWNSELF (football) and DEAD SOLID PERFECT (golf).


----------



## LauraB (Nov 23, 2008)

Once a Runner , Don't recall author's name but the book is on Kindle. Or was a few months ago.
Legend of Bagger Vance  , golf


----------



## Harry Shannon (Jul 30, 2010)

Dang it JD, ya stole my choices.


----------



## JD Rhoades (Feb 18, 2011)

Harry Shannon said:


> Dang it JD, ya stole my choices.


Great minds ...


----------



## QuantumIguana (Dec 29, 2010)

Not a novel, but Paper Lion is good, regarding George Plimpton going undercover as a quarterback to the Detroit Lions training camp.


----------



## rbrusuelas (Feb 19, 2011)

Hi folks, new to the site, first post, so be kind... 

Playing for Pizza, by John Grisham (football)


----------



## MariaESchneider (Aug 1, 2009)

rbrusuelas said:


> Hi folks, new to the site, first post, so be kind...
> 
> Playing for Pizza, by John Grisham (football)


I think I read that one. NO wait. I think it was "Bleachers" I read that was about football! Welcome to the forums!

And I wouldn't call it "great" as in classic, but a funny (and sometimes vulgar with one of the players) book I enjoyed was Who's Your Caddy? By Rick Reilly. We listened to it on audio--it was hilarious (skip the John Daily section if you want to miss the vulgarity).

Maria


----------



## Kristan Hoffman (Aug 6, 2009)

I don't know if this counts, but my boyfriend's favorite fiction book is SHOELESS JOE, which of course inspired the movie Field of Dreams.

Kristan


----------



## rbrusuelas (Feb 19, 2011)

Thanks for the welcome.  Bleachers looks like another good one.  Playing for Pizza is a fast and enjoyable read about a American QB that finds himslef playing in Italy.  

Seems that non-fiction sports stories dominate the category since hostory has shown us that there is a lot of drama in real life.  So great books like Season on the Brink (basketball, about Bobby Knight), Hoop Dreams (basketball), Boys of Summer (baseball) are great reads.  If you expand the definition of "sports" you can add Into Thin Air (mountain climbing).  

But if you exand the definition of sports to fishing, then consider A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean.  OK, so its really a novella, but it has perhaps the best writing I have ever read.  

“At that moment I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection. He stood before us, suspended above the earth, free from all its laws like a work of art, and I knew, just as surely and clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last.”

and 

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters."


----------



## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Only novel I can think of so far that has sports as a central them and that I thought was quite good (though I don't think I could call it great) is Terry Pratchett's _Unseen Academicals_.



I recall a P.G. Wodehouse short story or two about golf that were very enjoyable, too.


----------



## James Everington (Dec 25, 2010)

Can we count bull fighting as a sport? Because that gives us Hemmingway.


----------



## Martel47 (Jun 14, 2010)

Nick Hornby's _Fever Pitch_. It isn't exactly a novel, but it's a great book.


----------



## Thalia the Muse (Jan 20, 2010)

The Sportswriter, Richard Ford


----------



## Thalia the Muse (Jan 20, 2010)

And it's a "kids' book," but National Velvet is really an extraordinarily good novel!


----------



## Basilius (Feb 20, 2010)

Nearly everything Dick Francis wrote? (I haven't read his entire oeuvre to know if all of his novels center around horse racing, or just most.)


----------



## BTackitt (Dec 15, 2008)

I am not a big sports fan, rarely watch anything sports related.. but this was one of the first freebies Amazon had after I got my first kindle 2.5 years ago (WARNING IT'S NO LONGER FREE) I read it and really enjoyed it.


----------



## Andre Jute (Dec 18, 2010)

rbrusuelas said:


> Thanks for the welcome. Bleachers looks like another good one. Playing for Pizza is a fast and enjoyable read about a American QB that finds himslef playing in Italy.
> 
> Seems that non-fiction sports stories dominate the category since hostory has shown us that there is a lot of drama in real life. So great books like Season on the Brink (basketball, about Bobby Knight), Hoop Dreams (basketball), Boys of Summer (baseball) are great reads. If you expand the definition of "sports" you can add Into Thin Air (mountain climbing).
> 
> ...


I'm the OP. Sport is anything that is a sport, not just football and baseball. Fishing is definitely a sport.

I wished I'd mentioned A River Runs Through It... It definitely qualifies as "great"


----------



## Andre Jute (Dec 18, 2010)

James Everington said:


> Can we count bull fighting as a sport? Because that gives us Hemmingway.


Bullfighting is definitely a sport.

And it also gives us James Michener and Richard Condon.


----------



## Phil Edwards (Jan 13, 2011)

OK, if I were reading this thread, I would HATE my own reply. But Moneyball by Michael Lewis (which is not a novel) has an amazing character journey combined with some non-fiction fun. I'd really recommend it to anyone (along with, of course, his book The Blind Side). I know they aren't novels, but to me they have the deep and complex character journeys that make novels interesting.


----------



## Shelia A. Huggins (Jan 20, 2011)

Wow...I just realized that I've never read a sports novel. I'm going to think some more about this. Surely there is at least one.


----------



## Guest (Feb 23, 2011)

Not a novel, but...

It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong.


----------



## LaRita (Oct 28, 2008)

Has anyone read _Flanagan's Run_ by Tom McNab? It's about a cross-country (across the ENTIRE country) race in the 30's. One of my favorite reads. I keep clicking to get it on Kindle, but not yet, alas.


----------



## Thalia the Muse (Jan 20, 2010)

I haven't read it, but how about Bang the Drum Slowly?

Oh, and there's Michael Chabon's YA baseball fantasy, Summerland. That's supposed to be excellent.


----------



## Rory Miller (Oct 21, 2010)

You know the reason there are so few great sports novels, it's because the art can't imitate the reality. The best sports books are non-fiction, some of which we've covered but here's the best one of all time in my opinion:
Joe McGinness "The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro" http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Castel-Sangro-Passion-Folly/dp/0767905997/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298483517&sr=8-1

A review: The award winning author of "Fatal Vision" developed a passion for Italian soccer after the 1994 World Cup and decided to travel to Italy for a year to chronicle one of sports greatest Cinderella stories.

Castel di Sangro's soccer team did the impossible from going to the lowest levels of Italian soccer to the nation's second highest level in less than a decade (in comparison this would be like a high school baseball team rising to the level of AAA baseball).

Expecting to find the story of a small upstart team that beat the odds, McGinniss rather finds himself surrounded by a team and town in complete control of the local La Costa Nostra.

Mob influence, the tragic (non mob related) death of the teams star player, and an ending that shatters McGinniss' faith in sports and the game he loves are all covered in this powerful read.


----------



## Cuechick (Oct 28, 2008)

IMO these are the two best sports books I've ever read. Walter Tevis really understands how a competitor thinks and the focus and total dedication that is required. FYI: The book version of The Color of Money bares little resemblance to the movie version.

For anyone that does not regard pool as a sport, let me clarify it for you. A sport is a competitive game that also requires physical skill. If you don't think aiming a stick to hit a ball, into _another_ ball, into a small pocket, while also controling where the first ball ends up, requires physical skill, then I would be happy to play you some 8 or 9 ball for cash. 

Another great Tevis book, that explores the competitive mind, but is about chess (which is a game, not a sport... no physical skill required) is The Queen's Gambit, which I am re-reading now (something I never do). It is amazing, one of my favorite books of all time.



I love his work so much, I actually emailed his website asking about Kindle editions. He passed away in the mid 80's but his widow was kind enough to reply. She said she had not been able to reach an agreement with the publishers yet... so maybe one day. Well worth reading in paper form.


----------



## Rory Miller (Oct 21, 2010)

You know, I've never thought of Pool as a sport before, but I guess you're right.  We need more specific words for classifying sports, I've heard of "mind sports" being used for chess and certain board games but I think that is being generous with the term "sport" but I'm okay with "mind sports" instead of "sports."  I've even come to think of some things like track and field  as "athletic events" but not sports while golf is just a game, admittedly it is a game that takes some physical effort and skill, but it's ultimately a guy trying to accomplish something better than the others, which makes it pretty similar to spelling bees and arcade games where you try to post the best score.  Why the difference in my mind?  You don't play defense in track and field, golf, or several other things called "sports" by others.  To me a sport contains both offensive and defensive elements, or at least a complex strategy to win.  Under my (admittedly arbitrary) mindset of what a sport is, I guess Pool would actually fit that.  After all, you can strategize your shot to put the ball in a difficult place for your opponent to reach his goal (if you were to miss your shot as we know that possession doesn't change hands if you sink a ball in pool).  I just think to be a sport one side ought to have the ability to directly affect the ability of the other side to achieve their goal.  That happens in pool, soccer, basketball, etc, but not in golf, bowling, track and field.  Imagine how much more fun track and field would be to watch if the runners tried to trip each other--it'd be like a freakin' roller derby out there.  But my own contradiction would be that race-car driving is most certainly not a sport despite having the ability to "defend" against others.  The machine is doing too much of the work so race-car driving is more of a competition than a sport.  I'll also be one of the first to acknowledge how hard cheerleaders work and how difficult marching band can be, but neither are sports.

And to further take us off track (sorry), in what sport do you have the ball when you are on defense?


----------



## Iwritelotsofbooks (Nov 17, 2010)

sports, like comedy, tend to get published mostly as non fiction.  If you opened up to non fiction sports books, the list would be overflowing.  

That said, when I was little, there was a series of little league books and hockey-themed books I read.  None of them were great, but maybe most of the sports fiction is for young adults.


----------



## Andre Jute (Dec 18, 2010)

RorySM said:


> You know the reason there are so few great sports novels, it's because the art can't imitate the reality.


True, but the novelist has the option of setting his story against a real event. I did that with my dogsled race book and found it strangely liberating rather than restrictive. But yeah, if I wanted to earn a living out of writing about sports, I'd stick to non-fiction.

All the same, we've managed in only a few days and 29 posts to throw up an impressive collection of fiction beside the non-fiction.

A thread like this gets to be memorable if it has just one really great reminder. A River Runs Through It is a great book, a great reminder of a book I'd forgotten, a book worth rereading. I live over a salmon river...

Reminds me that there is another novel by a poet not yet mentioned, Deliverance by James Dickey. If you allow hunting as a sport, I suppose, or archery.


----------



## Cuechick (Oct 28, 2008)

RorySM said:


> You know, I've never thought of Pool as a sport before, but I guess you're right. We need more specific words for classifying sports, I've heard of "mind sports" being used for chess and certain board games


I think there is a lot of validity to the idea of "mental sports"... I do believe that once you master the physical aspect of a sport, the majority of your performance then comes from your mind. Focus is huge....! Sports are bascially a contest... usually of physical skill but there is still the same spirit and thrill of competition when the game is purely mental. I finished The Queen's Gambit last night and I have to say the training, frustration and mental toil the main character goes through is quite parallel to many an athlete and the description of the competitions is a very thrilling and I have only a rudimentary understanding of the game.

It felt very akin to what I have experienced as a competitive pool player... and I have played in some pretty high level events, including two pro tournaments...

Going back to the original question of this thread, I guess there are two kinds of sports enthusiast... those who enjoy it as entertainment, mainly as observers. Then there are those that are active participants and are looking at it from an athletes perspective. Which is what I liked about Tevis's books, he gets into the head of the character and to me the actual sport/game is almost irrelevant, it is the thrill of competition. This is probably why I have always loved all kinds of sports movies, from Secretariat to The Blind Side... Which reminds me, Seabiscuit would be classified as a sports book and it was excellent.



oh and I just checked, haven't read it but have heard it was good:


----------



## Guest (Feb 24, 2011)

Every single one Matt Christopher ever wrote that I read when I was ten. I must've gone through a dozen!


----------



## RobynB (Jan 4, 2011)

I don't think I saw this book mentioned, and while it's not a traditional sports story in that the narrator isn't competing against a team or individual, the narrator is competing against himself. It's called _The Memory of Running_ by Ron McLarty, who is an actor (_Law & Order_ fans will recognize him -- he's a regular judge. He was also Charlotte and Trey's sex therapist in _Sex & the City_. Don't judge  )

It's a great story, and it's available on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/The-Memory-of-Running-ebook/dp/B000P2A46I/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2


----------



## Jeff Sherratt Novelist (Feb 9, 2011)

Friday Night Lights expertly captures the influence high school football has over a small town in Texas. It is non-fiction, but I tink it is a must read for sports lovers and even young people. Puts life in perspective.


----------



## Andre Jute (Dec 18, 2010)

Thanks to all for the suggestions for a great TBR list, but I'd better love you and leave you as the real Iditarod starts next week and I've resurrected my Iditarod thread in the Book Bazaar. Don't want to give the mods the wrong idea, or indeed readers. See you again when I stop promoting my only sports book after the Iditarod race.


----------



## Neekeebee (Jan 10, 2009)

Most of W.P. Kinsella's books would qualify. He writes baseball fiction. _Shoeless Joe_ has already been mentioned but my favorite novel by him is _The Iowa Baseball Confederacy_.  _The Thrill of the Grass_  is even better, but is a collection of short stories, not a novel.

A little off topic, some excellent baseball related non-fiction: 
 _You Gotta Have Wa_ by Robert Whiting about Japanese baseball 
and
 _Wait Till Next Year_ by Doris Kearns Goodwin about growing up loving the Brooklyn Dodgers.

I do love my baseball books.

N


----------



## Learnmegood (Jun 20, 2009)

Would you count something like Black Friday, where a major sports venue (The Superbowl) is the setting for the otherwise-not-so-sports-related story?


----------



## Bigal-sa (Mar 27, 2010)

The Games by Hugh Atkinson. It was made into a really [email protected] movie too.


----------



## Andre Jute (Dec 18, 2010)

Learnmegood said:


> Would you count something like Black Friday, where a major sports venue (The Superbowl) is the setting for the otherwise-not-so-sports-related story?


It'll probably come down to deciding on a case by case basis. Perhaps first you'd ask whether the writer got it right for whatever amount of sports he includes.

When one of the major characters is sportsman, or perhaps otherwise professionally connected with the sport, and the story depends on that connection, I'd say yes without a doubt.

But what if his connection is only emotional? That's the reason I mentioned William Goldman's Marathon Man in the OP, that the lead character, Babe, is driven to run, in everything in life, by his image of a great barefoot marathon runner. But it is clearly not primarily a sports novel but what I call a gerinazi novel (about very old Nazi leftovers). Still, the information about sports is good, and suffuses the action.

Seems to me, from the slightly skewed viewpoint of a novelist, that if you exclude Marathon Man, you must definitely exclude Black Friday.


----------



## JD Rhoades (Feb 18, 2011)

Andre Jute said:


> what I call a gerinazi novel (about very old Nazi leftovers).


I laughed hard. Too perfect.


----------

