from: Houghton Mifflin
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.5408
EAN num: 9780618751167
ISBN number: 0618751165
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: October 10, 2007
Publishing house: Houghton Mifflin
Sale Popularity Level: 121696
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
For fans of sports and just plain great writing, this absorbing collection, featuring twenty-eight of the finest pieces from the past year, has something for everyone. Guest editor David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has assembled a fresh crop of the people and stories that dominated the sports world in 2006.
Michael Lewis gives a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary football coach Bill Parcells. Bob Hohler delves in the murky waters of modern amateur basketball, where teams blatantly dole out cash to players and shoe companies set their sights on prospects as young as twelve. William Rhoden traces the fate of an unknown filly injured on the racetrack. Jeff MacGregour describes the unforgettable Friars Club roast of boxing's provocative promoter Don King. Daniel Coyle follows a forty-year-old Slovene soldier who might be the world's best ultra-endurance athlete. L. Jon Wertheim tells of a young pro-basketball player who found himself wrestling the shoe bomber Richard Reid to the ground during a transatlantic flight. And Derek Zumsteg provides a hilarious and utterly original in-depth account of the baseball career of Bugs Bunny, 'the greatest banned player ever.'
These pieces and many more go beyond the spotlight, revealing the people and issues that make sports so relevant and important to all of us.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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No way is this collection worthy of only one star. There are too many good or better than good stories, as David Maraniss mixed it up to include a lot of different sports. His focus is on the human element, not actual game stories or their immediate aftermath, as they usually are far too ephemeral for a collection, not matter how sharply done.
The challenge for this particular set is that only a few are at all memorable enough to stick with you after completion. Too many are not that interesting or are nothing special or simply didn't appeal to me, such as the one on John Cheney and the odd take on Bugs Bunny.
My favorites were the high school football game that went 73-72, the running Hoyts, surfing technology, the Saturday hoops tradition, and Jake Scott. The surfing was a nice touch, as it was on a subject about which few readers probably have a clue, making it especially fresh and informative.
If you are only interested in a single sport or two, look elsewhere.
3.5 stars
Rated by buyers 
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I read the reviews here, but thought, "how bad can it be?" It's very bad. Every single story was dull, dull, dull. David Halberstam, we miss you!!!
Rated by buyers 
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This book takes for you for a loop in that you think that the major sports are going to be covered in baseball, football, basketball and maybe some hockey. The very first chapter is actually about racoon hunting and the subsequent one is a satire about Bugs Bunny if he played in an actual baseball game.
In fact here is a list of the additional sports covered in this book:
-High school "futbol"
-High school football
-Former NFL player Jake Scott's wherabouts today
-Mark McGwire in retirement
-The very first $100,000 bonus given to a baseball player
-Horseracing
-Don King & boxing
-Olympic skiier Bode Miller
-Cycling
-A woman race-car driver
-Fishing
-Surboarding
-Bill Parcells
-John Cheney
-Red Aurbach
-Shady HS Basketball sneaker company recruiting
-Travel baseball
-Former college football star's life after serious injury
-Pickup basketball games
-Pool
-Former college basketball player's encounter with stopping the shoe bomber
-Iraqi soccer
-Running
-Rodeos
-Turkey hunting
I am giving this book 5 stars to off-set the one-star rating because this book doesn't deserve that low of a rating. Most of the short-stories are from well-respected publications and notable authors. It is hard to read this book straight through because of the variety of the work, but it was a very high quality read.
Rated by buyers -
I bought most of the books in this series and gave them for Christmas gifts. My husband loves the Sports pages, so I gave him this book. He said the book has very few good stories, very poor writing in many of them. He said he felt that the editor decided he needed to have one story about each sport, rather than the best stories about a few sports.
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