Sporting House

For years, popular sports radio personality Stugotz has been telling fans that he keeps a “personal record book,” a kind of alternate sports universe in which Babe Ruth is not a great Yankee, Sean McVay has no rings, and Joe Namath is not in the Hall of Fame, to name just a few of his sacred proclamations.

Hailed as a classic when it first appeared in 1972, Michael Murphy's novel combines an amiable Zen mysticism with what many consider the very mystical - and sometimes downright frustrating - sport of golf. At its center is the charming guru of the Scottish links, Shivas Irons, whose instruction is as pertinent in life as it is on the course. After a long wait, this shamanic golf pro reappeared for the follow-up novel, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons.

Mike Matheny was just 41, without professional managerial experience and looking for a next step after a successful career as a Major League catcher, when he succeeded the legendary Tony La Russa as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in 2012. While Matheny has enjoyed immediate success, leading the Cards to the postseason three times in his first three years, people have noticed something else about his life, something not measured in day-to-day results.

Deena Kastor was a star youth runner with tremendous promise, yet her career almost ended after college, when her competitive method - run as hard as possible, for fear of losing - fostered a frustration and negativity and brought her to the brink of burnout. On the verge of quitting, she took a chance and moved to the high altitudes of Alamosa, Colorado, where legendary coach Joe Vigil had started the first professional distance-running team. There she encountered the idea that would transform her running career: the notion that changing her thinking - shaping her mind to be more encouraging, kind, and resilient - could make her faster than she’d ever imagined possible.

Here is an explosive book that takes us, for the first time, deep inside a shadowy, fascinating, and surreal world of unscrupulous doctors, anything-goes team directors, and athletes so relentlessly driven to succeed that they would do anything—and take any risk, physical, mental, or moral—to gain the edge they needed to win. The Secret Race is a riveting, courageous act of witness from a man who is as determined to reveal the hard truth about his sport as he once was to win the Tour de France.

Mat Fraser is undisputedly the fittest man in CrossFit history for winning the CrossFit Games an unprecedented five times. A student of engineering, Fraser optimized his body like a machine, and his absolute dedication to the training program he designed for himself is now legendary. Fraser became a master of identifying his weaknesses and then seeking out training methods to improve them, and he's idolized in the fitness community for his relentless pursuit of peak performance. It's not hard to see why he achieved so much success - but how is a different question.

Every year on January 1, a quirky crowd of adventurers storms out across North America for a spectacularly competitive event called a Big Year: a grand, grueling, expensive, and occasionally vicious, "extreme" 365-day marathon of birdwatching. For three men in particular, 1998 would be a whirlwind, a winner-takes-nothing battle for a new North American birding record.

On February 17, 2022, Brittney Griner arrived in Moscow ready to spend the WNBA offseason playing for the Russian women’s basketball team where she had been the centerpiece of previous championship seasons. Instead, a security checkpoint became her gateway to hell when she was arrested for mistakenly carrying under one gram of medically prescribed hash oil. Brittney’s world was violently upended in a crisis she has never spoken in detail about publicly—until now.

Super Bowl-winning coach and number-one New York Times best-selling author Tony Dungy has had an unusual opportunity to reflect on what it takes to achieve significance. He is looked to by many as the epitome of the success and significance that is highly valued in our culture. He also works every day with young men who are trying to achieve significance through football and all that goes with a professional athletic career, such as money, power, and celebrity.

For Rick Pitino, the first coach to bring teams from three different schools to the Final Four, success isn’t about shortcuts. Pitino’s secret - and the reason he has become both a great coach and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the nation - is his strategy of overachievement. Now, in Success Is a Choice, he takes the same proven methods that have earned him and his teams legendary status and gives you a 10-step plan of attack that will help you become a winner at anything you set your mind to.

Drawing from Moskowitz's original research, as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler, the authors look at: the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists; the surprising truth about the universally accepted axiom that defense wins championships; the subtle biases that umpires exhibit in calling balls and strikes in key situations; the unintended consequences of referees' tendencies in every sport to "swallow the whistle," and more.

Moneyball is a quest for something that money can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected by a brotherhood of baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, and physics professors. These numbers prove that the traditional measure of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. This information has been around for years, and nobody paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A's.

The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most future Hall of Famers competing at one time in any given season—battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.

Over its seventy-plus years of history, Formula 1 racing has grown from a niche motorsport with just a few events per season into a global phenomenon followed by more than a billion fans. With just twenty drivers competing at speeds of over 220 miles per hour on more than twenty of the world’s most glamorous and challenging racetracks, Formula 1 is the ultimate test of machine and humankind. To become a champion means to be counted among the most elite athletes the world has ever known.

Star point guard Mack Morris’s senior year of high school begins with twin cataclysms: the death of Mack’s father and the arrival of transfer student Liv Cooper. Playing side by side for their high school basketball team, Mack and Liv discover an electrifying, game-winning chemistry on the court. Off the court, they fall into an equally intoxicating more-than-friendship—one that feels out-of-bounds in their small Pennsylvania town. Mack teeters on the precipice of adulthood as desire and grief collide with drugs, sex, and the looming college signing deadline.

Through extensive research, expert sourcing and interviews with insiders, Britain’s most celebrated investigative biographer, Tom Bower, has unearthed a succession of revelations that give surprising insight into the reality of ‘Brand Beckham’. Exploring the couple’s relationship, and the truth about their football and fashion careers, their finances and their new life in Miami, The House of Beckham unravels the extraordinary reality of the business-savvy cultural icons to tell an engrossing, often astonishing story of money, sex and power.

Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He’s got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. But when he gets the chance to play on his high school football team, his world suddenly starts to shift. Basking in their recent victory, Vikram and his teammates Diego and MJ attend a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. They find themselves lost in the dark of night in one of the caves, carried away by male bravado, with a classmate who has annoyed them for years.

From New York Times bestselling author Leigh Montville, this riveting and definitive new biography pulls back the red, white, and blue cape on a cultural icon—and reveals the unknown, complex, and controversial man known to millions around the world as Evel Knievel.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling.

"Your only job is to help your players be better." That single idea had a huge impact on Tony Dungy when he heard it from one of his earliest mentors, and it led him to develop the successful leadership style so admired by players and coaches throughout the NFL. Now, a storied career and a Super Bowl victory later, Tony Dungy is sharing his unique leadership philosophy with you.