https://newbooksnetwork.com/mountaintop

When the 1997 college football season began, the once-mighty Michigan Wolverines were dismissed nationally as a relic of a bygone era. Michigan had posted four straight four-loss seasons and started out No. 14 in the polls for the third straight year, its worst preseason rankings since 1985. Michigan was led by an accidental third-year coach, Lloyd Carr, who had suffered through back-to-back four-loss seasons after taking the job in the middle of a proverbial tornado. The starting quarterback was a fifth-year, former walk-on who nearly quit the sport. The offensive and defensive coordinators were brand new, the schedule was the toughest in the country, and Michigan’s status as a football powerhouse teetered on a razor’s edge. 

Right before the opener, Carr’s team heard a survivor from a Mount Everest tragedy describe what it took to do the impossible, when everything around you was falling apart. Climb the mountain became the team’s mantra. Four months later, the Wolverines stood on college football’s summit as the 1997 national champion, a perfect 12-0. A team with several future Pro (and College) Football Hall of Famers, the first-ever defensive Heisman Trophy winner (Charles Woodson), the greatest QB in football history (Tom Brady) and the last QB to ever beat him for an open job (Brian Griese), the 1997 Wolverines reset the standard for greatness at the school with the most victories in the sport’s history. This is the story of climbing the mountain, individually and as a brotherhood, during Michigan’s most fabled season ― one ending with its first national championship in a half-century and lone title in the last 75 years. Nick Baumgardner and Mark Snyder’s book Mountaintop: The Inside Story of Michigan’s 1997 National Title Climb (Printopya, 2023) is the journey from the inside, from the players, coaches, and staff members who lived the experience.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-one-hundred-most-important-players-in-baseball-history

Baseball lore and history is filled with many valuable players, and not all of them are the Hall of Famers you know.

In The One Hundred Most Important Players in Baseball History (Artemesia Publishing, 2023) Lincoln A. Mitchell highlights the one hundred players who have had the biggest impact on baseball, popular culture, and history through their careers inside or outside of baseball. You’ll find stories about famous players like Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, but also lesser known but deeply impactful baseball players like Curt Flood, Hal Chase, and Felipe Alou. For over 120 years baseball has been a deep part of American life as folk culture and big business, but for just as long it has also been central to race relations, labor issues, global conflicts, and the songs of Bob Dylan. These one hundred players have influenced not only America’s pastime but the country as well.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/earl-cureton-and-jake-uitti-earl-the-twirl-my-life-in-basketball-mcfarland-2023

Earl “The Twirl” Cureton was never a star player in the NBA, but then again, few people will ever be a celebrity athlete.  Earl’s story, instead, is about a life on the fringes of the league during its “Golden Era” of the ’80s and ’90s. A teammate of Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Michael Jordan, Charles Oakley, Muggsy Bogues, Hakeem Olajuwon, and more, Earl was a part of seven NBA teams in his twelve-season career. He won two championships during his career, first in 1983 with the Philadelphia 76ers, and then in 1994 with the Houston Rockets. And yet, as a professional basketball journeyman, every day was a struggle.

Growing up in Detroit during race riots, Earl worked hard and became a standout player at the University of Detroit. A 6′ 9″ center in the pros, Earl battled with Karem Abdul-Jabbar in back-to-back NBA Finals. While many know the stories of big names like Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird, few understand the life of a player on the outskirts of the league. This is Earl’s own story, a unique perspective on the trials of a journeyman player: non-guaranteed contracts, tryouts and cuts, playing overseas, coming back from injury, and the looming “right of first refusal.”  

https://newbooksnetwork.com/baseballs-endangered-species

Scouting has been called pro baseball’s personalized way of renewing itself from year to year and a pathway to the game’s past. It takes a very special person to be a baseball scout: normal family life is out of the question because travel is a constant companion. Yet for those with the genuine calling for it, there could be no other life. Hearing the special thwack off the bat that indicates a raw prospect may be the real deal is the dream that keeps true scouts going. Scouts have the difficult task of not only discovering and signing new players but envisioning the trajectory of raw talent into the future. But the place of the traditional scout has become increasingly dire.

In 2016 Major League Baseball eliminated the MLB Scouting Bureau that had been created in the 1970s to augment the regular scouting staffs of individual teams. On the eve of the 2017 playoffs that saw the Houston Astros crowned as World Series champions, the team dismissed ten professional scouts and by 2019 halved the number of all their scouts to less than twenty. More and more teams are replacing their experienced talent hunters with people versed in digital video and analytics but who have limited field knowledge of the game, driven by the Moneyball-inspired trend to favor analytics, data, and algorithms over instinct and observation.

In Baseball’s Endangered Species Lee Lowenfish explores in-depth how scouting has been affected by the surging use of metrics along with other changes in modern baseball business history: expansion of the Major Leagues in 1961 and 1962, the introduction of the amateur free agent draft in 1965, and the coming of Major League free agency after the 1976 season. With an approach that is part historical, biographical, and oral history, Baseball’s Endangered Species is a comprehensive look at the scouting profession and the tradition of hands-on evaluation. At a time when baseball is drenched with statistics, many of them redundant or of questionable value, Lowenfish explores through the eyes and ears of scouts the vital question of “makeup”: how a player copes with failure, baseball’s essential, painful truth.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/roy-white-from-compton-to-the-bronx

Roy White played on the New York Yankees from 1965 through the 1979 season. Roy grew up on the tough streets of Compton and created a successful all-star baseball career playing alongside such greats as Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and many others. Today Roy White sits among the greatest all-time Yankees in most offensive categories. After his career with the Yankees, Roy White became a star in Japan playing for the Tokyo Giants and playing alongside the greatest Japanese player of all time Sadaharu Oh.

Considered one of the classiest baseball players ever, this is Roy White’s story, but it’s also the story of a unique period in baseball history when the Yankees fell from grace and regained glory and the country dealt with societal changes in many ways.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/black-ball

Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed. Basketball became a symbol for post-civil rights America: the rules had changed, allowing more Black people onto the playing field, and now they were ruining everything.

Enter Black Ball, a gripping history and corrective in which scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball’s “Dark Ages.” Weaving together a deep knowledge of the game with incisive social analysis, Runstedtler argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the modern-day NBA. Black players introduced an improvisational style derived from the playground courts of their neighborhoods. They also challenged the team owners’ autocratic power, garnering higher salaries and increased agency. Their skills, style, and savvy laid the foundation for the global popularity and profitability of the league we know today.

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 every NFL team. Topics include spying on practices, stealing paperwork and signals, debriefing personnel that switch teams, listening devices, headset tampering, elicitation, Spygate, Deflategate, and so much more!

Written by a former Special Agent with decades of experience collecting and safeguarding information for the Department of Defense, Spies on the Sidelines reveals that, behind the game-day action, professional football can be as cloak-and-dagger as American intelligence agencies. This fascinating and expansive compilation of NFL spy anecdotes exposes the extraordinary measures teams are willing to take in order to win.

Spies on the Sidelines has been featured on CBS Cleveland television, on ESPN radio in Houston, Huntsville, Kansas City, and Washington DC, on numerous nationally syndicated radio shows, and on more than 25 podcasts.

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.

Over the course of 657 games, primarily with the New York Jets and the Miami Dolphins, Westhoff was a relentless innovator—constantly figuring out new ways to help the individual skills of hundreds of players surface and develop.

Interviews with dozens of his contemporaries and former players such as Sean Payton, Taysom Hill, and Zach Thomas provide a rare glimpse of NFL life beyond the field—inside the offices, meeting rooms, and locker rooms with one of the game’s most unforgettable personalities. But his story isn’t just about football. Westhoff also shares intimate details of his multiple battles with cancer and the life lessons learned through the fights.

In Figure It Out: My Thirty-Two-Year Journey While Revolutionizing Pro Football’s Special Teams (Mascot Books, 2022), Westhoff presents his one-of-a-kind experiences and unfiltered views in his trademark style—a refreshing blend of honest (sometimes brutally so), funny, and poignant. His deep insights into the workings of special teams—illustrated by 27 detailed original diagrams—and timely commentary on the current state of pro football reveal a critical side of the sport that very few truly understand.

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 a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.

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 and everybody turns to stare when we walk down the street. … Whites believe that their culture is superior to African-American culture. … We don’t accept many of [their] answers, but we have to live with them.”

Ray Scott was part of the early wave of Black NBA players like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who literally changed how the game of professional basketball is played—leading to the tremendously popular financial blockbuster the NBA is today. Scott was a celebrated 6’9” forward/center after being chosen by the Detroit Pistons as the #4 pick of the 1961 NBA draft, and then again after he was named head coach of the Pistons in October 1972, winning Coach of the Year in the spring of 1974—the first black man ever to capture that honor.

Scott’s is a story of quiet persistence, hard work, and, most of all, respect. He credits the mentorship of NBA player and coach Earl Lloyd, and talks about fellow Philly native Wilt Chamberlain and friends Muhammad Ali and Aretha Franklin, among many others. Ray has lived through one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history, especially the time of assassinations of so many Black leaders at the end of the 1960s. Through it all, his voice remains quiet and measured, transcending all the sorrows with his steadiness and positive attitude. This is his story, told in collaboration with the great basketball writer, former college player and CBA coach Charley Rosen.