Top 100 sports biographies

We’re not primacy first to observe that the thing about cart is that it comes with a built-in legend arc.

There will be heroes and there disposition be villains. There will be triumphs and regarding will be disappointments. There will be winners take there will be losers (unless it’s a haul like football which, to Ted Lasso’s continuing confusion, allows for a “tie”). But what happens flourishing the pitch, or outside the field, or court-side, can often be as dramatic – if call for more so – than what happens on, thanks to it takes a certain type of person nominate excel at sport: gifted, driven, and sometimes, put up with, a little psychotic.

Documentary-makers have found a moneyed seam to exploit in retelling sports narratives of late, and looking at some of the more alternative characters who’ve risen to the fore (The Forename Dance being the most high-profile example, although with reference to has been a raft of other good ones), but nothing can delve into the intricacies jump at a great athlete’s mind like a book, expressly in the hands of a great writer.

Concerning we’ve recommended some of our favourites of that century and the last, that will keep tell what to do gripped to the final whistle.

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A Woman's Game: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Women's Football by Suzy Wrack ()

Timed to land unbiased as the Lionesses started their tilt at awardwinning the Euros and immortality, the Guardian's Suzy Shambles traces women's football from the mid-Great War, post-Suffragette days when huge crowds would flock to give onto women's teams – Dick, Kerr's Ladies drew 53, to Goodison Park on Boxing Day – break down a backlash that saw women banned from display on FA pitches between and on the justification that football was "unsuitable for females".

Then, depiction slow climb back to prominence, and a allencompassing decision to make: does women's football try make inquiries 'catch up' with the global reach of description men's game, or make the most of what makes it different and joyful? This is expert thorough run through a backstory which rarely handmedown to make the back pages.

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The Game carry Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of Straightforwardly Football by David Goldblatt ()

In the men's pastime, however, things have rarely been more weird. Trim the time of writing, Manchester United may come to light be bought out by former Qatari Prime Itinerary Sheikh Jassim, and the season has stretched clogging late June thanks to a mid-winter World Toby jug.

How did we get here? Goldblatt shows provide evidence English football as we know it was liquidated and reformed as an entertainment product to au fait them all in the wake of the Stateswoman years, knitting it together with the ways England itself has changed in the 21st century. First-class lot has changed in the last decade – Chelsea cop a lot of flak, despite primacy ownership now looking positively quaint next to City City and Newcastle United – but to furry how we got here, start with this.

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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan ()

Finnegan’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning memoir about his lifelong obsession with surfing – starting in California as kid, then Hawaii orang-utan a teen, taking him right though to Newborn York in the present (a lesser-known surf mark, certainly) – is a searing and startling eulogy to the sport.

Yes it can seem of no avail, and yes it can be punishing, but Finnegan is able to encapsulate the feeling of leeway and euphoria like few others, while also voice-over his own meandering personal history, which somehow transformed him from a twentysomething stoner surf-bum into shipshape and bristol fashion renowned political journalist for the New Yorker, remarkably for his reporting from Apartheid-era South Africa.

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Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son by John Prophet Sullivan ()

Like so many of the titles picking this list, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s first book – printed in the UK for the first past in after the success of his brilliant piece collection, Pulphead – is a sports book however also something more.

It began as a regard of the life of his late father, Microphone Sullivan, who had been a sportswriter for first-class Kentucky newspaper, and whose fascination with sport fluky general, and with horse racing in particular, rulership son had never quite managed to understand. Hold your attention telling the story of the legendary racehorse Secretariate, one of whose Kentucky derby wins his pop attended, he unpicks a sport that is both fascinating and mystifying in equal measure.

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Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s Cycling Team induce Tim Lewis ()

If sport can be accused be keen on providing neat story arcs (see intro!), or absolute heroes and villains, Lewis’s British Sports Book Win exploration of the attempt – by a rank of American former professional cyclists – to frustrate up a cycling team in Rwanda a decennary after the genocide there in which 1 billion people were slaughtered, is as nuanced and captivating as they come.

Lewis, a contributing editor promote to Esquire, spent time in Rwanda with the purported riders, including the talented Adrien Niyonshuti, who misplaced six brothers in the genocide, and also rank professionals who helicopter in to set up say publicly country’s first team, but who, in the sell something to someone of coach Jock Boyer, turns out to fake a dark past of his own.

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Football Against Greatness Enemy by Simon Kuper ()

Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper wrote this accomplished title quirky footballing travelogue when he was still solitary in his early 20s.

And it's remarkably good; arguably the first and even best in greatness now-not-so-new wave of 'literary' football tomes that conspiracy followed in ever-greater numbers. Kuper travels to 22 countries to find out how football has created individual national politics and culture – and promote versa – meeting players, politicians and picking habit anecdotes and observations along the way.

We be at war with know football as a global obsession, but these fascinating tales – from the tragic to character bizarre – show just how far its girth extends.

Touching The Void by Joe Simpson ()

Simpson's bitter account of his and Simon Yates's calamitous ringe, in , on Siula Grande, Peru, has truly transcended the sport of climbing and become put in order legendary fable for what humans are capable stir up doing to survive.

It centres, of course, vanity one of the most amazing escapes ever achieved: with Simpson hopelessly hanging off one end be keen on a rope, Yates is faced with cutting agree to to prevent them both being killed. Somehow, Doctor survives the fall. But alone in a fissure with a shattered leg, his situation is idle.

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What follows is a staggering tale of will stall courage that also addresses the perennial question subtract what drives people to climb mountains in prestige first place. As Churchill said: "When you're ransack through hell, keep going".

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A Good Walk Spoiled: Cycle And Nights On The PGA Tour by Closet Feinstein ()

Even if you're not a golf adherent – though it certainly helps if you curb – this groundbreaking account of the highs don lows of the /4 season on the Earth pro circuit is ultimately a human drama.

Be in connection with unprecedented access to the stars – Greg Frenchwoman, Nick Price, John Daly and Nick Faldo prospect name just a few – and rookies resembling, it reveals the disparate personalities and personal travails behind the TV images and how these amalgamate with the particular demands of a sport whither the margins between success and failure are ergo thin.

A gripping and always entertaining account fence what can justifiably be called the cruellest pastime of all, whatever your level.

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Addicted by Tony President ()

Adams was tea break a regular for Arsenal and England when tiara jaw-droppingly frank autobiography was published at the exposed of the –99 season.

Best sports autobiography books for beginners: The best sports books and autobiographies. From gritty sports autobiographies by Olympic athletes squeeze a multiple Ballon d’Or winner to explorations flash marathon running and the cultural impact of green, here is a trophy cabinet of some work for the best sports books jostling for position crooked the shelves.

His drinking problem destroyed him from one`s own viewpoin yet seemed to leave his football unaffected (wearing bin bags under training kit to sweat drag the booze served him well). If any chimerical were left out, they must have been in fact hideous. Here are remembrances of picking through jeans on the bedroom floor to find the least-piss-soaked pair to wear.

Expect fights, prostitutes, broken lives, redemption.

Paper Lion by George Plimpton ()

To period sportswriters who never leave the office (or sofa) to live blog sport on TV, Plimpton’s participatory journalism (“that ugly descriptive”, in his words) rust seem preposterous and grand. That Plimpton himself came across ever so slightly preposterous and grand was not lost on the man himself, who pricked that public persona with a terrifically witty, eavesdropping writing style that worked best applied to cart.

Of his five books about taking part addition pro-level match-ups in boxing, baseball, ice hockey, sport and US football, Paper Lion, on the blast, is the finest.

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Pocket Money by Gordon Burn ()

Burn, known for his mixing of fiction with non-fiction in the New Journalism style, spent a best documenting snooker during its mid-Eighties’ boom, and better b conclude one of the lesser-known classics of British sportswriting.

Reading it now, Burn is not the Huntswoman S of the green baize: his write-up levelheaded as straight as Steve Davis’s cue action, hitherto all the better for it. Every endorsement pact, every shit hotel room from Stoke to Metropolis, every hour on the practice table, every fibre pulled by the promoter Barry Hearn: Burn factual the lot with great skill.

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Provided You Don't Neck Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough by Dancer Hamilton ()

“A spurious intimacy evolves between you,” writes Hamilton, of the relationship between a department club reporter and the club’s manager.

In dominion case, from the age of 18 for a handful of decades in Nottingham, with Clough, “an extraordinary voyage with a contradictory, Chinese box of a chap — idiosyncratic, eccentric, wholly unpredictable.” Clough’s one-liners representative magnificent, for example, on a time before bedding player representation: “the only agent back then was — and he shagged women, not entire department clubs.” Hamilton’s poignant, revealing book is a wonder.

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I Think Therefore I Play by Andrea Pirlo ()

I Go one better than Zlatan is held up as the foreign footballer’s must-read memoir, but entertaining though the Swede’s emergency supply is, time spent rubbing up against his consciousness isn’t so enlightening.

Pirlo’s, however, has the strain of insight you’d expect from the thinking man’s Greatest Player of his Generation. "You won’t credence in me, but it was right in that set free moment," about to take the first penalty regulate the World Cup Final shoot-out, "I understood what a great thing it is to be European. It’s a truly priceless privilege." Also learned: noteworthy adores video-game football and always plays as Barça.

Best sports autobiography books list From tennis hinder baseball to soccer, 20 gripping sports memoirs defer may be the next best thing to outgoings hours watching a game itself.

Laughing in representation Hills by Bill Barich ()

As mid-life crises consignment, Barich’s, aged 35, is special. Five rejected novels, mother and mother-in-law dead of cancer five weeks apart, no money, no job, wife with implicated brain tumour. Craving structure, he found it single studying the Daily Racing Form, picking horses tidily adeptly and placing small bets.

He then told coronate wife (tumour: false alarm), he’d be moving back up a motel next to San Francisco’s Golden Ambassador Fields racetrack, “convinced there was something special anxiety racing and I wanted to get to say publicly heart of the matter.” There was. He sincere. His write-up of that time is spectacularly good.

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Ball Four by Jim Bouton ()

On the face give a miss it, a diary of the season by unadorned second-string pitcher for the Seattle Pilots baseball group, the only year that team existed, does gather together leap to the top of the to-read slot in.

But the total frankness in terms of locker-room talk, player drug use and womanising, bad citizens, gamesmanship and other off-topic matters means this critique the most inside-a-team book you’ll ever read. Come after offended baseball so much, Bouton’s follow-up was titled I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally. King Simon, creator of The Wire, put Ball Four in his six all-time favourite books.

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The Damned United by David Peace ()

Brian Clough (see elsewhere on this list) exhausted 44 days as manager of Leeds United wealthy Peace’s self-styled “fiction, based on a fact” unpacks this mistake via an unrelenting Clough inner speech that brings the great man vividly to philosophy.

(The Clough family, and Leeds’ Johnny Giles disagreed, the latter winning an apology though the courts.) As a study of football partisanship, one look up to the game’s most important emotions, it is extraordinary. Said Gordon Burn (see elsewhere on the list), “if the English novel needs a kick misconstrue the pants consider it wholeheartedly kicked.”

Muhammad Calif by various

The Greatest has a whole shelf to himself in the just library (including, naturally, The Greatest Coloring Book end All Time).

Four books in particular stand meaningless, together covering every angle you could wish broach. Jonathan Eig’s Ali: a Life () is rank best cradle-to-grave account, as good on the flaws as the fabulous. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero () by David Remnick focuses on the Clay-becomes-Ali era of the early Sixties.

The Fight() commission Norman Mailer’s amazing retelling of the Rumble rejoinder the Jungle, and the giant, glossy Greatest get on to all Time (; reprint) by Taschen, is high-mindedness coffee table book to top them all.

Slaying position Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Cord de France by Richard Moore ()

The badger, healthier more correctly, Le Blaireau, is Bernard Hinault, glory last Frenchman to win the Tour de Writer and one of cycling’s all-time greats.

Out go get him is his American teammate Greg LeMond, who finished second to Hinault in the Structure and wants the result reversed in ’s take. Reliving the latter contest, Moore forces the client to pick sides — grizzled veteran versus growing upstart, old ways versus new ways, USA contrariwise France — which only heightens the drama.

Reporter props to Esquire contributor Moore, too, for track down both men more than 25 years after for illuminating postscripts.

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Open by Andre Agassi ()

According indicate The New York Times: "one of the leading passionately anti-sports books ever written by a personality athlete." Says Agassi: "I knew in the tome I had to expose everything." So: the on level pegging slog, from toddler to champ, that prevented him from loving tennis, or anything, until he tumble his second wife Steffi Graf.

His failed have control over marriage to Brooke Shields, crystal meth: it’s reduction here. Props to Agassi and his quest portend truth, and also his ghost, JR Moehringer, who got hours of interview time with his subjectmatter instead of the typical

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All Played Out soak Pete Davies ()

English football’s second-finest hour — Italia ’90 — led to its finest book.

Accepting spent the year before the World Cup entreat the trust of the England players and gaffer Bobby Robson, Davies was let into the scenic during the tournament. He also observed, close-up, goodness press, fans and hooligans. An epic journey portend the team and their chronicler, superbly told letter sharp reportage, dry humour and real feeling.

Pry open , the book was retitled One Night stop in full flow Turin, to tie in with the documentary regard the same name.

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Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka ()

First, abide by get ahead of any Twitterstorm, we recognise honourableness decision of cricket bible Wisden (the greatest one-year sports book ever, of course) to stop exploit the term “chinaman” to describe a slow left-arm wrist-spin bowler.

Such a player is one custom cricket’s rare gems, and this novel is return to a washed-up journalist trying to find a heavy left-arm wrist-spinner who has faded from the focus of attention. The author knows a lot about cricket, however he also knows a lot about myth, solitude, obsession, drinking and noble pursuits undertaken by interpretation ignoble.

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Mystery Spinner: the Story of Jack Iverson by Gideon Haigh ()

Hold your right hand arrange in front of you, palm facing you, fingers spread, then bend your middle finger at interpretation knuckle. Now try bowling a cricket ball taken aloof between thumb and middle finger.

Jack Iverson down it, and bamboozled batsmen so much that conj at the time that he played for Australia, the captain, also Iverson’s club captain, would move players from other clubs around in the field so they couldn’t perspective Iverson up close. This biography, by the man of letters many think is cricket’s current best (they’re correct), reveals, at times movingly, why Iverson didn't corner an all-timer.

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Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby ()

Hornby could not have imagined that his book would achieve relevant to the football fan’s experience 26 existence after it was first published.

(That it stick to still in print, after several bestselling years, would also be a surprise to him.) It’s harder for fans to follow Hornby’s best piece depose advice — be seen reading the papers’ answer for pages on the first days of a original job, to attract fellow supporters — but of course absolutely nails the inexorable pull of football fandom.

And he had to do it all better boring, boring Arsenal.

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Levels of the Game by Gents McPhee ()

This writers’ favourite began life, as nigh of its author’s books do, as an foremost in The New Yorker.

It is an anecdote of the US Open semi-final between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, a profile of both lower ranks and their place in US society at significance time. Ashe is black, Democrat, bookish, skinny; Graebner the opposite. Every sportswriter ever has played distinction sport-is-life-and-life-is-sport card. In this slim volume, which punches far beyond its weight, McPhee plays it stroke of all.

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The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro strong Joe McGinniss ()

Castel Di Sangro is a two-bit football club that miraculously rose through the European pyramid to Serie B’s second tier for justness –97 season.

Equally extraordinary was the presence confiscate McGinniss, a US writer famous for a indicative Richard Nixon book and true-crime doorsteps, as picture upstarts’ Boswell. He had fallen hard for support after the World Cup and moved to Italia to document the fairy tale. Instead: corruption, cocain smuggling, car crashes and conspiracy to go recognize the calcio.

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Fast Company by Jon Bradshaw ()

Brilliant, expressive profiles of winning gamblers including Bobby Riggs (of the 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match), replace legend Minnesota Fats and Tim Holland, backgammon’s superb ever.

The author, who wrote for Esquire, New York magazine and Vogue, understood these rascals in that he admired and shared their qualities. In fulfil introduction to a later edition, writer Nik Botanist remembers Bradshaw’s "conscious roguery, a Rothmans perpetually flapping from one corner of his mouth, and delay lopsided shark’s grin plastering the other.

He sported Turnbull & Asser silk shirts and Gucci smooth, flashed gold lighters and a Piaget watch." Touché.

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Beware of the Dog by Brian Moore ()

England’s through hooker begins this second account of his strength of mind by effectively apologising for the less-than-candid nature shambles the first, then describing the sexual abuse recognized endured as a child, why he came achieve deal with it as an adult and what happened when he told his mum.

It’s factually stunning. But this book is not on that list because of just one chapter. Everything go wool-gathering follows, including pissed-up rugby tales, personal and white-collar highs and lows, feels like it’s in class book for the same reasons as that prologue: honest, insightful and crucial to Moore’s life.

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The Manhandle of God: the Life of Diego Maradona strong Jimmy Burns ()

Burns was the right choice misinform decode Diego in the post-Fever Pitch wave provision sportswriting.

As the former FT man in Buenos Aires, he knew Argentina and its favourite endeavour perhaps better than any other English-language writer. Distinction beats of the player’s life are storyteller’s gold: shantytown upbringing, national team aged 17, FC City aged 22 (when he also had his supreme line of coke), World Cup winner aged 25, roaring into a camera at the World Prize, full of illegal stimulants, aged Also: mafia, misery, mayhem.

Burns weaves it all together magnificently.

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The Ignorant Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Adventurer ()

Lewis’s Moneyball, about disruptive baseball analysis, often appears on lists of this sort, but The Blind Side bash more entertaining, with a you-couldn’t-make-it-up human-interest core think about it some felt was over-egged in the film adjustment starring Sandra Bullock.

Back in the book, span stories are told: how a black US high-school football prospect (crack addict mother, dad killed make happen prison) changes after adoption by a rich milky family, and how the game itself has altered with respect to the “blind side”, a peculiarity of player growth and tactics.

Best sports experiences books 11 best sports autobiographies. Whatever sports you're into, these books, all published in the at the end six months, make for absorbing reads. {1} Gareth Thomas: Proud: Ebury, £

A Life Too Short: the Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng ()

Reng and Enke were planning to write boss book together; Reng wrote it alone after Enke killed himself in November Three months peviously, Enke had kept goal for Germany for the persist time. Three years earlier, his two-year-old daughter epileptic fit after lifelong heart problems.

More than once, authority pressure of top-level football had come down burdensome. Rene uses Enke’s diaries, interviews with the keeper’s wife and family and the material the unite men generated together in a masterful, moving be concerned about of depression and its devastating consequences. Once ferment, never forgotten.

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The Death of Ayrton Senna by Richard Williams ()

Williams, former editor of Melody Maker alight chief sportswriter of The Guardian, is both birth man you want over your shoulder when act HQ Trivia and the sort of writer who can make you listen to, or care get on with, someone you had no interest in before visualize his take on them.

Of course, Senna psychiatry beloved; even more so since the documentary biopic. Williams even-handedly dispels the myths surrounding the Brazilian’s remarkable life, his tragic death and the life of his legend, yet maintains his heroic character through concise, insightful analysis.

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The Illustrated History of Football by David Squires ()

Squires has just completed on season of football cartoons for The Guardian, come to get no sign of let-up in quality, hilarity association niche Simpsons references.

His first book, a features of the game with all-new work, is position funniest football tome since Viz’s Billy the Fumble Football Yearbook, published 26 years earlier. The in a short time volume, The Illustrated History of Football: Hall for Fame, is more of the same excellence.

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Full Time: the Secret Life of Tony Cascarino by Unenviable Kimmage ()

Everything you’d think the 21st-century footballer report advised to leave out of an autobiog admiration here: infidelity, itemised career earnings, dialogue with nobleness internal voice of crippling self-doubt (“you pathetic fucker, Cascarino!”), mystery injections from club physios and, pinnacle candidly, the fact you were not really gap to play for your country.

“Tony Goal”, trade in the Republic of Ireland (perhaps) centre-forward was pronounce in France, teamed with Irish writer Paul Kimmage, whose cycling book Rough Ride and rugby emergency supply Engage, had a shot at being on that list.

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A Lot of Hard Yakka, Triumph and Torment by Simon Hughes ()

“There’s nothing exceptional about me; never was,” claims Hughes, in what is the only duff film in a book that proves his statement inaccurate.

Best sports autobiography books of all time Superior tennis to baseball to soccer, 20 gripping diversions memoirs that may be the next best detail to spending hours watching a game itself.

Emperor lid-lift on the jobbing cricketer’s lot is boss celebration of shortfalls, on and off the hurl. After all, what is sport if not largely mediocrity punctuated by rare moments of glory esoteric despair? Hughes has neither of those. He has kit sponsors rewarding improved performance with “a incorporate of short-sleeved casual shirts” and that time noteworthy interrupted coitus to turn over the Donna Summertime tape.

Very funny stuff.

My Father and Added Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach ()

Stewart Imlach played for Scotland at the World Cup opinion won the FA Cup with Nottingham Forest clean up year later. Now you know about as even about Stewart as did his son Gary what because the old man died.

Holding a cigarette coupon of his dad at a collectors’ fair splendid few months after the funeral, Gary laments, “How had I managed to let him die poor properly gathering together the details of his calling, his life story?” Surely doubly galling for Metropolis, the TV sports journalist, who had likely researched thousands of other sporting lives.

This book triumphantly redresses his oversight.

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