Showing titles in Sports History

This is the story of how a visionary president, an astute athletic director, and a genius head coach assembled a group of misfit players-and turned the losingest program in college football history into champions. For more than a century, the Indiana University Hoosiers lived at the bottom of the college football world-outmatched, overlooked, and resigned to history. Then Curt Cignetti arrived and told anyone who would listen that Indiana would win. Not someday. Soon. What followed wasn't a miracle. It was a standard.

The Boston Braves (the present-day Atlanta Braves) were a bunch of losers and alcohol-soaked whiskey swiggers, buried in last place as late as mid-July of 1914. This rough gang was led by their bullying, superstitious manager George Stallings and assisted by Johnny Evers, a nasty, egotistical captain who was despised by opponents and umpires alike.

While many books have been written about Super Bowl games, never has one been written about how the Super Bowl itself became the greatest sporting event created in the twentieth century. Only one person can tell that story, truthfully, completely, and in the utmost detail, and that is Jim Steeg. Publicly known as “Mr. Super Bowl,” Steeg spent almost four decades at the upper-most management levels in professional football, twenty-six of those years as the NFL’s Senior Vice President of Special Events.

A story of obsession, glory, and the wild early days of Ultimate Frisbee. David Gessner devoted his twenties to a cultish sport called Ultimate Frisbee. Like his teammates and rivals, he trained for countless hours, sacrificing his body and potential career for a chance at fleeting glory without...

On the night of March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, right up the street from the chocolate factory, Wilt Chamberlain, a young and striking athlete celebrated as the Big Dipper, scored one hundred points in a game against the New York Knickerbockers. As historic and revolutionary as the...

From the acclaimed #1 bestselling author . . . a riveting journey through the world of minor-league baseball “No one grows up playing baseball pretending that they’re pitching or hitting in Triple-A.” —Chris Schwinden, Triple-A pitcher “If you don’t like it here, do a better job.”...

The riveting inside story of college basketball's fiercest rivalry among three coaching legends—University of North Carolina's Dean Smith, Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, and North Carolina State's Jim Valvano—by the king of college basketball writers, #1 New York Times bestseller John Feinstein On...

Soccer has been America's Sport of the Future since 1972. Propelled by the rise of the World Cup, Premier League, the glory of the United States Women's National Team, Lionel Messi's DemiGod-esque talent and repeat exposure to Cristiano Ronaldo's preening abs, that Future has finally arrived...

Sally Jenkins, bestselling co-author of It's Not About the Bike, revives a forgotten piece of history in The Real All Americans. In doing so, she has crafted a truly inspirational story about a Native American football team that is as much about football as Lance Armstrong's book was about a...

If you’d guess that Yale or Harvard ruled the college gridiron in 1911 and 1912, you’d be wrong. The most popular team belonged to an institution called the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Its story begins with Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, a fierce abolitionist who believed that Native...

The first in-depth look at Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal, the phenomenal business success built on the back of fraud, and the greatest conspiracy in the history of sports Lance Armstrong won a record-smashing seven Tours de France after staring down cancer, and in the process became an...

Dusty Tomes Audio Books are public domain books retrieved from history. If today’s technology had been available when first printed, they would be audio books already. I am grateful for the opportunity to record them now. Read online at archive.org.

In June 1972, President Richard Nixon put pen to paper and signed the Educational Amendments of 1972 into law. The nearly 150-page document makes no mention of “gender,” “athletics,” “girls,” or “women.” The bill did not appear to contain anything earth shattering. But tucked into its final pages, a heading appears, “Title IX—Prohibition of Sex Discrimination.” These 37 words would change the world for girls and women across the United States. On its face, Title IX legally guaranteed equal opportunity in education.

The 1910 University of Pittsburgh football team not only had the honor of being the second undefeated team in the program’s history, the first being the 1904 squad that went 10-0, but it also did something that the ’04 squad didn’t, it went through the entire campaign with a defense that didn’t allow a point. It was as close to perfection as a team could achieve. Win all your games and pitch a shutout in every contest.

The New York Yankees. The Boston Red Sox. For a hundred years, no two teams have locked horns as fiercely or as frequently – and no two seasons frame the colossal battle more perfectly than 2003 and 2004. Now, with incredible energy and access, leading sports columnist Mike Vaccaro chronicles...

Even today, it’s considered one of the most thrilling races in Olympic history. The hundred-meter sprint final at the 1924 Paris Games, featuring three of the world’s fastest swimmers—American legends Duke Kahanamoku and Johnny Weissmuller, and Japanese upstart Katsuo Takaishi—had the cultural impact of other milestone moments in Olympic history: Jesse Owens’s podiums in Berlin and John Carlos’s raised, black-gloved fist in Mexico City. Never before had an Olympic swimming final prominently featured athletes of different races, and never had it been broadcast live.

For fifty years, bestselling author Peter Golenbock has been interviewing some of the most fascinating figures in baseball. Their conversations are a journey back in time to the days of Ruth and Gehrig, Gehringer and Greenberg, Robinson and Reese, and Howard and Mantle, as they reflect on the sport's greatest moments and biggest issues.

Sihugo Green, Dick Ricketts, Dave Ricketts, Mickey Winograd, Lou Severine, Jim Fallon, Lou Iezzi, Paul Lojpersberger, Ralph Leng, John Nosworthy, Tom Peszko, Bob Schneider, Dudey Moore and Red Manning. They are all connected, in perpetuity, as a special group of men who not only captured the lone major national title in Duquesne University history, but to date the only Division I college basketball national championship the city of Pittsburgh has ever produced in a tournament. No other team has ever had the honor of raising a national championship trophy.

The 1960 Missouri Tigers football team entered the season with low expectations. But over the course of their incredible season, they set or broke nearly every record in school history en route to a controversial national championship run. Not only is this true story a record of on the field football accomplishments, but it also follows the story of Norris Stevenson and Mel West, the first two African-American players to ever play at Missouri.

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Kirkus Reviews Most Anticipated Book of the Fall A moving celebration of the history of American football from the New York Times bestselling author of Why We Love Baseball After his bestselling home run books Why We Love Baseball and The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski...