Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Sports

After covering the American sports scene for 15 years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world - the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”

Describing how NFL great Willie Davis helped define the hard-nosed, in-your-face defense of the original football dynasty, the 1960s Green Bay Packers, this revealing autobiography also illustrates his persona off the field - humble yet ambitious, with an infectious smile and a reputation of strict discipline that matched his leadership mentality.

One of the most endearing of American heroes, Casey Stengel guided the New York Yankees to ten pennants in twelve seasons. Here is the brilliant manager stripped naked - the person underneath all the clowning, mugging, and double-talking.

Robert Creamer shows us Casey at twenty-two, famous from his very first day in the big leagues. We see Casey's playing career fall apart as he is traded, shunted to last-place teams, hampered by injuries, considered finished - until he bats a glorious home run in the 1923 World Series.

Seventy baseball seasons ago, on a May afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Joe DiMaggio lined a hard single to left field. It was the quiet beginning to the most resonant baseball achievement of all time. Alongside the story of DiMaggio's dramatic quest, Kennedy deftly examines the peculiar nature of hitting streaks and with an incisive, modern-day perspective gets inside the number itself, as its sheer improbability heightens both the math and the magic of 56 games in a row.

Herschel Cobb's moving account of his relationship with his legendary grandfather reveals a side of Ty Cobb that few people ever saw, that of loving nurturer. A baseball icon and arguably the best player who ever lived, Ty Cobb's infamously cold, competitive nature allowed him to excel on the ball field but undermined his relationship with his children. Devastated by the untimely death of two of his sons, Cobb relished the opportunity to reconnect the broken family ties when young Herschel and his siblings visited him during the summers.

When he stepped onto the Wimbledon grass in 1920, Bill Tilden was poised to become the world’s greatest tennis star. Throughout the 1920's he dominated the sport, winning championship after championship with his trademark grace, power, and intelligence. He owned the game more completely than Babe Ruth ruled baseball, making his name, for more than a decade, synonymous with tennis. This classic biography, by legendary sports writer Frank Deford, tells of Tilden’s dominance, unlike anything the sport had ever seen - and the big man’s tragic fall.

In The Jump, one of America's great sports writers follows high school phenom Sebastian Telfair on his quest for NBA stardom - and exposes all that big-time sports in America has become, the good and the bad. Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James - all became NBA superstars without playing a day of college ball. In 2004, Coney Island's 5-foot-11 Telfair became the first small player ever to jump straight from high school to the NBA when he signed contracts with the Portland Trail Blazers and Adidas worth $25 million.

In this unique and meaningful book, Shizuka Ijuin, an award-winning author and a friend of baseball legend Hideki Matsui, profiles the beloved New York Yankee–a world-class athlete who exemplifies a quality that Ijuin believes is central to success and well-being: modesty. Hideki Matsui embodies the Eastern virtue that combines compassion and self-effacement with high achievement. Born in a northern coastal town of Japan, Matsui was a phenomenon by the time he was a teenager, playing baseball in the famous high school league tournament at the Koshien Stadium and nicknamed “the wunderkind from the North.”

Acclaimed baseball writer Roger Kahn gives us a memoir of his Brooklyn childhood, a recollection of a life in journalism, and a record of personal acquaintance with the greatest ballplayers of several eras. His father had a passion for the Dodgers; his mother’s passion was for poetry. Somehow, young Roger managed to blend both loves in a career that encompassed writing about sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Time.

One of the most storied college basketball programs in America, the Kansas Jayhawks have produced some of the greatest legends to ever roam the hardwood. In this newly revised edition of Tales from the Kansas Jayhawks Locker Room, fans can sift through a treasure trove of first-hand memories from the players and coaches who made history at the University of Kansas.

For two decades, Davis Phinney was one of America’s most successful cyclists. He won two stages at the Tour de France and an Olympic medal. But after years of feeling off, he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s. The body that had been his ally was now something else: a prison. The Happiness of Pursuit is the story of how Davis sought to overcome his Parkinson’s by reaching back to what had made him so successful on the bike and adjusting his perspective on what counted as a win. The news of his diagnosis began a dark period for this vibrant athlete, but there was also light.

In The Wit and Wisdom of Yogi Berra, author Phil Pepe takes Yogi from St. Louis to New York's Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, including all the stops along the way - from the days he put soles on women's shoes to his induction into the Baseball's Hall of Fame, when he coined one of his most remembered phrases: "I thank everybody for making this day necessary." Phil Pepe explores Yogi Berra as a boy, player, hero, coach, manager, husband, and father, a buffoon and a human being. He relates all of the Berraisms in an absorbing treatment that is simultaneously comical, thoughtful, and biographical.

Seen around the world, John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute on the 1968 Olympic podium sparked controversy and career fallout. Yet their show of defiance remains one of the most iconic images of Olympic history and the Black Power movement. Here is the remarkable story of one of the men behind the salute, lifelong activist John Carlos.

The author, a native of Philadelphia and an alumnus, as was Wilt Chamberlain, of Overbrook High School, spent four years researching and interviewing the most important people in Wilt's life. The result is a capturing of Wilt's personality and thoughts that relatively few people other than family and closest friends ever knew.

Sleeper Cars and Flannel Uniforms brings baseball legends to life through the eyes of Elden Auker, a submarine-style pitcher in the American League from 1933-1942.

A baseball prodigy since the age of 10, Pat Jordan had been interviewed on television and written about in newspapers at an early age. Signed as a pitcher by the Milwaukee Braves upon his graduation from high school, he believed his success would continue for years to come. But after three diminishing seasons in the minor leagues, he was cut from the roster and began painfully constructing a new life. In the wreckage of his baseball career, Jordan found new success as a writer.

The college basketball scandals of 1951 were to basketball what the 1919 Black Sox scandals were to baseball - a loss of innocence, after which the game would be permanently tarnished, its relationship to power and big money firmly established. In Scandals of '51, Charley Rosen identifies all the major figures - including players, coaches, gangsters, clergymen, politicians - that made up the elaborate network that controlled the outcomes to many games or protected those who did so.

The most beloved and decorated player in Florida history takes fans behind the scenes and into the locker room for one of the greatest eras in the annals of college football. Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Danny Wuerffel, now retired from the NFL, has finally had the time to look back, reminisce, and share his thoughts about that magical time when he was referred to by some "as the greatest passer to ever play college football."

Roger Kahn is one of America's foremost sportswriters. After successful seasons as a newspaperman and magazine writer, he burst onto the national scene in 1972 with his memorable bestseller, The Boys of Summer, a work that went beyond sports and captured the minds and hearts of millions across the country. Now in his eighth decade, Kahn has again written a book for the hearts and minds of his readers.

When Eli Manning found teammate Plaxico Burress in the end zone with just 35 seconds remaining in Super Bowl XLII, he completed what was perhaps the greatest game-winning drive and unlikely upset in Super Bowl history. But the drive, which also included a remarkable escape and pass completion to unheralded receiver David Tyree, was the culmination of years of promise and development.