With prices of new books approaching the cost of a ticket to a Bears, Bulls or Blackhawks playoff game, discerning sports enthusiasts are being asked to make some difficult gift choices this holiday season.
Sports literature, once little more than an oxymoronic genre bloated with puffy as-told-to ”autobiographies,” now provides fans with a dizzying variety of reading material from which to choose. Excellent studies of celebrated athletes and personalities, in-depth looks at events, issues and equipment share shelf space with sophisticated how-to books and the usual array of tweedy tomes on fly-tying. As Harry Caray might say, ”You can`t beat fun at the old book store.”
The inescapable title this year is The Jordan Rules (Simon & Schuster, $22), a year-in-the-life story of our now-kingpin Bulls by Tribune
sportswriter Sam Smith. Its fly-on-the-wall observations of team chemistry, executive machinations and Michael Jordan`s always fascinating role on and off the hardwood has had the town buzzing for weeks.
For fans who just can`t get enough of the Bulls` championship season, both city newspapers have published ”instant” books-the Tribune`s Chicago Bulls Stampede! ($19.95; $12.95, paper) and the Sun-Times` The Bulls: A Season to Remember ($9.95)-that are filled with staff-produced analysis, game replays and photos.
As readable and ambitious as ”The Jordan Rules” is John Feinstein`s Hard Courts (Villard, $22.50), another year-in-the-life examination of sport, this time the professional tennis circuit. Feinstein has pulled this sort of thing off well in the past, notably with ”A Season on the Brink,” about the Indiana University basketball program and coach Bobby Knight.
This time, he records the wanderings, thoughts and deeds of the young millionaires who traipse around the globe playing their chosen game, meanwhile trying to cope with insanely protective parents and greedy agents, homework
(in the case of teen phenom Jennifer Capriati), international travel and a bewildering set of rules and regulations imposed by numerous governing bodies. As with everything else in the athletic world these days, money is the dominating presence, yet the drive and talent of these men and women, boys and girls, is treated with respect throughout.
Want more controversy? More basketball? Don`t forget Wilt Chamberlain`s A View From Above (Villard, $20), a book worth considering if only for the picture on the dust jacket of Chamberlain`s 4th-grade class. By now, we`ve all heard too much about Wilt the Stilt`s 20,000 sexual conquests-especially in light of the coincidental announcement of Magic Johnson`s condition-so fans should know that only a tiny part of the book concerns the big guy`s love life.
Then there`s Mike Tyson: Money, Myth and Betrayal (Birch Lane, $22.95), a biography by Montieth Illingworth of the former heavyweight champion and one of the most intriguing and perplexing personalities of our time. The book sets out to examine Tyson through his exploits and fights, and his relationships with mentors such as Cus D`Amato, Bill Cayton and Don King. The Tyson saga is far from over-he faces rape charges next month in Indianapolis and, perhaps, Evander Holyfield after that-but interest in this heavyweight champ keeps growing-for better or worse.
Before we get much further, here are my three distinctly personal choices for holiday giving this year. Dan Jenkins` You Gotta Play Hurt (Simon & Schuster, $22) is a ribald and hilarious new novel starring sportswriter Jim Tom Pinch, who many readers will remember with fondness from ”Semi-Tough.”
Pinch has moved from a Ft. Worth newspaper to New York and the world of weekly magazine columnizing.
I`m also recommending Jim Harrison`s Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (Clark City, $24.95), which is filled with wonderfully literate stories and articles on hunting, fishing, eating and a life lived close to the earth.
The other title is a stocking-stuffer paperback, which I just discovered last month after reading Carl Hiaasen`s riotous new novel ”Native Tongue.”
Hiassen`s Double Whammy (Warner, $4.95), delightfully skewers the professional bass fishing circuit, tele-evangelists and real estate developers in Hiassen`s beloved Florida.
Nostalgia is always a key player in books about baseball, and this year is no exception. In addition to a monstrous new edition of the Total Baseball encyclopedia (Warner, $49.95), stuffed with enough stats and charts to choke both the Cubs and Red Sox squads (as if they need help in that department), there`s also the lovely coffeetable-ready photo essay Baseball in America
(Collins, $45), featuring the work of more than 50 top photographers; The Forever Boys (Birch Lane, $19.95) by veteran writer Peter Golenbock, who writes about former greats and near-greats now playing extra innings on the senior circuit; and A Whole Different Ball Game (Birch Lane, $21.95), by a man who truly changed the pastime: former union leader Marvin Miller.
There are even three new books on Ted Williams, a player and sportsman of truly mythic proportions, on the 50th anniversary of his remarkable .406 season: The Ted Williams Reader (Fireside, $11, paper), a collection of writings on the man; Ted Williams: The Seasons of the Kid (Prentice Hall, $40) by writer Richard Ben Cramer, archivist John Thorn and photographer John Thorn; and Ted Williams: A Baseball Life (Contemporary Books, $18.95) a biography by Michael Seidel.
Football is represented this year in The Football Encyclopedia (St. Martin`s, $49.95), with enough stats to choke the Denver Broncos (ditto);
Bears: In Their Own Words (Contemporary, $19.95), with jottings by Chicago football notables ranging from Mike Ditka to Jim McMahon to Red Grange; Slick (Macmillan, $19.95), a biography of maverick L.A. Raiders owner Al Davis;
and a wacked-out novel by former Detroit Lions behemoth and sportscaster/actor Alex Karras, Tuesday Night Football (Birch Lane, $17.95).
Two oversized basketball books of interest are At the Rim (Thomasson-Grant, $35), a look at the women`s collegiate game through photographs, and 100 Years of Hoops (Oxmoor, $36), a Sports Illustrated book whose title says it all.
This season`s collection of coffeetable golf books is rich. The Random House International Encyclopedia of Golf (Random House, $60) looks to be the pick of the litter, with a huge volume of information, photos and descriptions of the intricate working of the game. The PGA Manual of Golf (Macmillan, $39.95) offers tips to us duffers, while Grand Slam Golf (Abrams, $49.50) and Golf Courses of Hawaii (Collins, $39.95) provide the stuff that dreams are made of for wintertime golfers.
The armchair sportsman might also enjoy a new-and, its editors hope, annual-collection of wisdom compiled by David Halberstam and David Stout, The Best of American Sports Writing: 1991 (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95). Top pressbox scribes competed for a spot in the book, and the winners are anointed here.
Anglers will be delighted with such titles as The Atlantic Salmon Fly
(Chronicle, $39.95), artist/sportsman/essayist Russell Chatham`s The Angler`s Coast (Clark City, $34.95) and Batfishing in the Rainforests (Lyons & Burford, $19.95), described as ”strange tales of travel and fishing.” And hunters will lust for the beautifully reproduced artwork in The Story of the Sporting Gun (David & Charles, $75) and Winchester: An American Legend (Random House, $65), in which dozens of historically interesting weapons are given the Playboy treatment.
For all you dog sledders out there-and you know who you are-Kim Heacox has compiled a chill-enducing picture book and essay on the sport, Iditarod Spirit (Graphic Arts, $37.95). If nothing else, it will scare the heck out of lazy old Fido.
