Author Archives: Paul Knepper

https://newbooksnetwork.com/spies-on-the-sidelines Spies on the Sidelines: The High-Stakes World of NFL Espionage details the collection techniques that NFL teams utilize to gather information on their opponents in order to gain a game-day advantage, as well as the countermeasures used to defend against them. The book spans the entire history of the league and contains anecdotes from everyContinue reading “Podcast with Kevin Bryant about his book Spies on the Sidelines: The High-Stakes World of NFL Espionage”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/figure-it-out-my-thirty-two-year-journey-while-revolutionizing-pro-footballs-special-teams Simply put, Mike Westhoff is the greatest special teams coach in National Football League history. Sharp-witted, creative, and intensely focused, Westhoff spent 32 years working alongside and learning from some of the legends of the sport—including Don Shula, Dan Marino, Bear Bryant, and Woody Hayes—while revolutionizing the most misunderstood phase of the game. OverContinue reading “Podcast with legendary special teams coach Mike Westhoff about his book Figure It Out”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/lost-in-the-game For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime’s experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as aContinue reading “Podcast with Thomas Beller author of Lost in the Game”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-nba-in-black-and-white A memoir of hard lessons learned in the racially segregated and sometimes outright racist NBA of the early ‘60s by celebrated NBA player and the first Black Coach of the Year, Ray Scott. Introduced by Earl “the Pearl” Monroe. “There’s a basic insecurity with Black guys my size,” Scott writes. “We can’t hide andContinue reading “Podcast with Ray Scott, author of The NBA In Black and White”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/muggsy-2 Growing up, Muggsy Bogues was always told he should do something else, anything besides basketball. He never acknowledged his many doubters except to prove them spectacularly wrong. Twenty years after receiving his first basketball as a toddler, he stood proud—at five-foot-three—as the starting point guard for the Charlotte Hornets in the NBA. From theContinue reading “Podcast with Jake Uitti, co-author of Muggsy: My Life from a Kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball“

https://newbooksnetwork.com/randall-balmer-passion-plays-how-religion-shaped-sports-in-north-america-unc-press-2022 Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn’t help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. Houses of worship once railed against Sabbath-bustingContinue reading “Podcast with Randall Balmer about his book Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports In North America”

The Least Among Them: 29 Players, Their Brief Moments in the Big Leagues, and a Unique History of the New York Yankees https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-least-among-them The Least Among Them: 29 Players, Their Brief Moments in the Big Leagues, and a Unique History of the New York Yankees (Artemesia, 2021) is a most special baseball book that looks atContinue reading “Podcast with Paul Russell Semendinger, author The Least Among Them”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-duke In the early 1990s, Tommy Morrison, a young roughneck from Jay, Oklahoma, burst onto the boxing scene to become one of the most controversial fighters of his era. Handsome, eloquent, and dynamic, Morrison parlayed destructive knockout power and a homespun personality into celebrity status throughout middle America, where boxing rarely prospered.  But it wasContinue reading “Podcast with Carlos Acevedo, author of The Duke: The Life and Lies of Tommy Morrison”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/hoops From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding nineteenth-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It wasContinue reading “Podcast with Thomas Aiello, author of Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America”

https://newbooksnetwork.com/by-the-grace-of-the-game When Lily and Alex entered a packed gymnasium in Queens, New York, in 1972, they barely recognized their son. The boy who escaped to America with them, who was bullied as he struggled to learn English and cope with family tragedy, was now a young man who had discovered and secretly honed his basketballContinue reading “Podcast with Dan Grunfeld about his book By the Grace of the Game: The Holocaust, a Basketball Legacy, and an Unprecedented American Dream”