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BY Rohit Brijnath
IN MY study, against one wall, a deep black bookcase stands like a stern sentry, holding and guarding my sports books. Their pages are dog-eared to remind me of something unusual, paragraphs marked with pen, Post-Its protruding like a periscope.
These books are my homework, yet also my pleasure.
It's impossible to make a Top 10 Best Sports Book list. I have changed my list six times and given up. After all that, Norman Mailer's The Fight, which I used to worship as a boy, is not there.
I have tried to make a list that encompasses a diversity of sports and heroes.
If there is a pattern, it is my partiality for extraordinary sportsmen. We know what they do is brilliant, but always we want to know, how? No book can explain it all, but many get close.
1) It's Not About The Bike: My Journey Back To Life
By Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins
Take an extraordinary life, put it in the hands of a gifted sportswriter and you get a smooth, fascinating read. Armstrong takes us inside his illness, then his recovery, and lets us peek into a mind that is so single-minded it is frightening. From hospital room to exhaustion on the mountains, this has to be read.
2) The Amateurs: The Story Of Four Young Men And Their Quest For An Olympic Gold Medal
By David Halberstam
A stunning insight into sacrifice and the will of athletes as four rowers, all married to pain, attempt to qualify for the 1984 Olympics. It is brutal and breathtaking, heroic and heartbreaking, all at once.
3) Muhammad Ali: His Life And Times
By Thomas Hauser;
Ghosts Of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali And Joe Frazier
By Mark Kram
These books go together because they tell the many sides of Ali. Hauser's book is a sweeping oral history of the greatest sportsman we've ever seen. But Kram's grimmer, darker book, while occasionally unfair, does help strip away some of the myths that surround Ali.
4) The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, And Less Than Four Minutes To Achieve It
By Neal Bascomb
The mile is the perfect race, the four-minute mark was its ultimate barrier. Then in the 1950s, three men - Roger Bannister, John Landy and Wes Santee - challenged that barrier, pushing themselves and each other further than any man ever did. Wonderfully written, superbly inspiring.
5) A Handful Of Summers
By Gordon Forbes
The funniest, chirpiest book I have read on sport, a recounting of life on the tennis tour in the 1950s and 1960s by a South African player. Never have the characters of the game been so wonderfully revealed.
6) Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream
By H.G. Bissinger
Small towns in the United States are often besotted with a sports team and it can become an insane, beautifully, ugly romance. Rarely has it been told as grippingly as Bissinger's account of his year with the 1988 Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas.
7) In Black And White: The Untold Story Of Joe Louis And Jesse Owens
By Donald McRae
For a long time, black athletes fought two opponents: Other athletes and racism. Louis and Owens were friends and their struggle to greatness, elegantly told, is both incredibly important and profoundly moving.
8) Seve: The Biography
By Lauren St John
This is a romantic choice. There are better golf books but few more interesting golfers. Seve Ballesteros was an artist with a golf club and St John paints an emotional, fascinating portrait of him.
9) Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life
By Richard Ben Cramer
I don't watch baseball, but this man, an American icon, a private man yet married to Marilyn Monroe, intrigued me. Cramer's book, diligently researched, is a compelling character study, a captivating read even for those who don't care for the game itself.
10) Pundits From Pakistan: On Tour With India, 2003-04
By Rahul Bhattacharya
A special tour (to Pakistan) found a special writer. Bhattacharya was young, fresh, with a superb eye, a keen mind and a wry touch. Sport is not easy to write and first books are almost never so good.
Rohit Brijnath is a Senior Correspondent with The Straits Times
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