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 Sunshine State Scoreboard

 

Pound-for-pound the top boxing writer of all time, Liebling is at his bare-knuckled best here, bobbing and weaving between superb reporting and evocative prose. The fistic figures depicted in this timeless collection of New Yorker essays range from champs such as Rocky Marciano and Sugar Ray Robinson to endearing palookas and eccentric cornermen on the fringes of the squared circle. Liebling's writing is efficient yet stylish, acerbic yet soft and sympathetic. ("The sweet science, like an old rap or the memory of love, follows its victims everywhere.") He leavens these flourishes with an eye for detail worthy of Henry James. The one-two combination allows him to convey how boxing can at once be so repugnant and so alluring.

 

A baseball book the same way Moby Dick is a fishing book, this account of the early-'50s Brooklyn Dodgers is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise's 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it. Kahn writes eloquently about the memorable games and the Dodgers' penchant for choking -- "Wait Till Next Year" is their motto -- but the most poignant passages revisit the Boys in autumn. An auto accident has rendered catcher Roy Campanella a quadriplegic. Dignified trailblazer Jackie Robinson is mourning the death of his son. Sure-handed third baseman Billy Cox is tending bar. No book is better at showing how sports is not just games.

 

Though a declining knuckleballer, Bouton threw nothing but fastballs in his diary of the 1969 season. Pulling back the curtain on the seriocomic world of the big leagues, he writes honestly and hilariously about baseball's vices and virtues. At a time when the sport was still a secular religion, it was an act of heresy to portray players "pounding the Ol' Budweiser," "chasin' skirts" or "poppin' greenies." (And that was during games.) Bouton's most egregious act of sacrilege -- his biting observations about former teammate Mickey Mantle -- led to his banishment from the "Yankee family." But beyond the controversy, Ball Four was, finally, a love story. Bouton writes, "You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."

 

Schoolboy football knits together the West Texas town of Odessa in the late 1980s. But as Permian High grows into a dynasty, the locals' sense of proportion blows away like a tumbleweed. A brilliant look at how Friday-night lights can lead a town into darkness.

 

This collection of letters from a fictional (and grammatically challenged) pitcher named Jack Keefe, originally published in installments in The Saturday Evening Post, earned Lardner a spot in the pantheon of American humorists alongside Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

 

Bob Knight still curses the day he granted the author unfettered access to his program. Feinstein's year as an honorary Hoosier yielded an unsparing portrait of Indiana's combustible coach and spawned the best-selling sports book of all time.

 

Running back Billy Clyde Puckett of TCU and the Giants calls himself the "humminest sumbitch that ever carried a football." Puckett is also the funniest, and the dialogue in this raunchy novel still crackles. Also read Jenkins' golf novel, Dead Solid Perfect.

 

No one today does what the fearless Plimpton once did with regularity. Here, in his first Walter Mitty-esque effort, the author of the equally brilliant Shadow Box and The Bogey Man infiltrates the Detroit training camp as a quarterback with no arm, no legs and no shot.

 

Hall of Fame goalie Dryden was always different. A Cornell grad, he led Montreal to six Stanley Cups, then at 26 sat out a year to prepare for the bar exam. His book is different too: a well-crafted account of his career combined with a meditation on hockey's special place in Canadian culture.

 

How can the rest of the world summon such passion for soccer? You'll understand after reading Hornby's deeply personal and wonderfully witty account of an otherwise normal bloke who develops a full-blown obsession with Arsenal, the English Premier League team.

 

One publisher rejected this novella because "the stories have trees in them" -- thereby missing the forest. The tale of two brothers headed in different directions also has fly-fishing and family drama, presented in prose as crisp and clear as a Montana mountain stream.

 

The Pulitzer Prize winner (for his Vietnam War coverage) focuses on the 1979-80 Trail Blazers. Like A Season on the Brink, Breaks proves that a down year can make for high drama. Halberstam's baseball books, Summer of '49 and October 1964, are also excellent.

 

This collection of 21 New Yorker pieces, with gems on the woeful early Mets as well as the "flowering and deflowering of New England" during the Red Sox' 1967 "Impossible Dream" season, cemented Angell's place as the game's greatest essayist.

 

After a publishing exec implored him to find the "football Brosnan" (see above), Schaap corralled Kramer, a literate lineman for Lombardi's Green Bay Packers. The book climaxes with Bart Starr's sneaking behind Kramer's block to win the Ice Bowl against the Cowboys.