In an era of sports media consumption that is reliant on behind-the-scenes Netflix documentaries and Twitter hot takes, sports books don’t get enough love. So, here are five of my favorites. No, it’s not a definitive selection. Yes, my choices skew towards basketball and soccer, my two favorite sports.

The best sports stories go beyond the games and players themselves to reveal what sports really are: human dramas. Each in their own way, these books do just that. 

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis 

By Sam Anderson 

This book is so good it made me want to move to frickin’ Oklahoma City. I read it cover to cover twice and then Googled everything else Sam Anderson has ever written. “Boom Town” is not, strictly speaking, a sports book. It’s an urban history that uses a basketball team as a constant framing device, active participant, and metaphor. The book goes back and forth through time, somehow making sections about tornadoes, segregation, and Kevin Durant’s soul structurally coherent. The chapter about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing is shocking. Anderson’s greatest gift as a writer lies in his ability to weave together all these threads and characters to generate a meaningful portrait of a little-known place. Basketball nerds and history nerds and city planning nerds will love this book. By the grace of God, I’m all three. 

Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks

By Chris Herring

When ESPN writer Zach Lowe read a draft of “Blood in the Garden,” he told Chris Herring that the book would change Herring’s life. It’s easy to see why. The book flows between a broad, mostly-chronological narrative of the Knicks’ fortunes in the 1990s and a series of profiles of key players and staff from the team. This thing is just ridiculously well-researched. Countless insane anecdotes breathe life into the story. You learn, for instance, about the time Head Coach Pat Riley dunked his head in freezing water for a concerning amount of time in service of an abstruse yet effective motivational tactic. More broadly, Herring makes a compelling case that through their style and personality, the ’90s Knicks, despite not winning a championship, are a defining team in NBA history. 

Zonal Marking: The Making of Modern European Football

By Michael Cox

“Zonal Marking” is a book that was named after a blog focused on the defensive soccer tactic of the same name. If you watch the Premier League today, you’ll see Spaniard Pep Guardiola’s possession and exacting position play at Manchester City, German Jurgen Klopp’s fast-paced pressing system at Liverpool, and Italian Antonio Conte’s three-man defensive structure and counter-attacking approach at Tottenham. This is a book about the cultures, philosophies, and teams from which those coaches’ tactics emerged. Each section is dedicated to a specific era during the last 30 years in which the coaches and ideas from a certain country dominated, only to be overtaken by a new set of innovative principles elsewhere. Reading Cox’s work is a perfect way to orient yourself in the intimidating world of soccer tactics. 

Brian Clough: Nobody Ever Says Thank You

By Jonathan Wilson 

It’s hard to do any deep dive into European soccer without encountering the prolific Jonathan Wilson. His classic, “Inverting the Pyramid,” is a gateway book for many, but I prefer this biography of Brian Clough, the angry, stubborn, brilliant, charismatic, tragic and triumphant player, coach, and man. It’s a fascinating deep dive into an uncommonly successful and complicated person. This biography will also be interesting to readers who, like me, have no relationship with a version of European soccer that predates the extreme wealth inequality and international, and sometimes geopolitical, nature of today’s game. Clough existed in another era in which a hard-headed coach could take financially small clubs like Derby County and Nottingham Forest to the pinnacles of English and European football respectively.

Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life

By Nick Hornby

Maybe you saw the Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore movie of the same name. Maybe it was so bad it prejudiced you against consuming anything called “Fever Pitch” ever again. Don’t let it. The real “Fever Pitch” is not a romance about the Boston Red Sox. It’s a touching coming-of-age memoir about Arsenal FC. The book chronologically tracks the ups and downs of Hornsby’s life, intertwining them with those of his beloved Arsenal. Hornsby was a lost and angry young man who found community and himself on the terraces of Highbury (Arsenal’s former stadium). His story, then, amounts to a deeply personal love letter to sports fandom. It’s a story specific of course to his own life, but relatable to anyone who has relied on their favorite team to get them through tough times and found deep, soul-level, collective happiness in wins.

 

Will Slater can be reached at wslater@wesleyan.edu.