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Books > Biography > Sport
The phenomenal international number one bestseller with exclusive interviews with Richie McCaw, Steve Hansen, Beauden Barrett and Dan Carter, The Jersey is the definitive story behind the greatest sports team on the planet.
With a better winning record than any other sports team in history, they stand head and shoulders above their nearest rugby rivals. How did a country of just 4.8 million people conquer the world?
Peter Bills, who has reported on international rugby for more than forty years, was given exclusive access to all the key figures in New Zealand rugby as he set out to understand the secrets behind the All Blacks success. Peter talked at length with ninety people, both in New Zealand and around the world, with intimate knowledge of what makes the All Blacks tick.
The Jersey goes to the heart of the All Blacks success. It is also an epic story of not just a rugby team but a nation, whose identities are inextricably linked.
Jimmy Connors is a working-man's hero, a people's champion who
tore the cover off the country-club gentility of his sport. A
renegade from the wrong side of the tracks, he broke the rules with
a radically aggressive style of play and bad-boy antics. Yet his
enduring dedication to his craft kept him among the top ten best
players in the world for sixteen years straight--five of those
years at number one. Presiding over an era that saw tennis attract
a new breed of passionate fans, from cops to tycoons, Connors
transformed the game forever with his two-handed backhand, his
two-fisted lifestyle, and his epic rivalries.
The complete, uncensored story of his life and career, The
Outsider is a grand slam of a memoir written by a man once again at
the top of his game--as feisty, unvarnished, and defiant as
ever.
For twenty years, Miki "Da Cat" Dora was the king of Malibu
surfers--a dashing, enigmatic rebel who dominated the waves, ruled
his peers' imaginations, and who still inspires the fantasies of
wannabes to this day. And yet, Dora railed against surfing's sudden
post-Gidget popularity and the overcrowding of his once empty
waves, even after this avid sportsman, iconoclast, and scammer of
wide repute ran afoul of the law and led the FBI on a remarkable
seven-year chase around the globe in 1974. The New York Times named
him "the most renegade spirit the sport has yet to produce" and
Vanity Fair called him "a dark prince of the beach." To fully
capture Dora's never-before-told story, David Rensin spent four
years interviewing hundreds of Dora's friends, enemies, family
members, lovers, and fellow surfers to uncover the untold truth
about surfing's most outrageous practitioner, charismatic antihero,
committed loner, and enduring mystery.
Red Auerbach was one of the greatest basketball coaches in
sports history. Bill Russell was the star center and five-time MVP
for Auerbach's Celtics, and together they won eleven championships
in thirteen years. But Auerbach and Russell were far more than just
coach and player. A short, brash Jew from Brooklyn and a tall,
intense African-American from Louisiana and Oakland, the men formed
a friendship that evolved into a rare, telling example of deep male
camaraderie even as their feelings remained largely unspoken.
Red and Me is an extraordinary book: an homage to a peerless
coach, which shows how he produced results unlike any other, and an
inspiring story of mutual success, in which each man gave his all
and gained back even more. Above all, it may be the most honest and
heartfelt depiction of male friendship ever captured in print.
America held little promise during the 1930's, when the Great
Depression vice gripped the country and a boy named Thomas Errol
Wasdin was born into the hardscrabble farmland of Waldo, Florida.
Wasdin was only months old when his mother died of blood poisoning.
Soon afterward, he and his sister were sent to live with their
Uncle and Aunt, who raised them with old-fashioned values rooted in
discipline and hard work. These became character traits that served
Wasdin well - later at the University of Florida and eventually
throughout his life. And what a life it has been; rich and varied,
and not without heartache and an ongoing, debilitating battle with
Trigeminal Neuralgia, which the medical profession chillingly
refers to as the Suicide Disease. It is a life that saw Wasdin
shape the lives of poor children from literally and proverbially
the wrong side of the tracks in Jacksonville, Florida; children who
later became attorneys, administrators, sports stars, politicians,
educators, husbands, wives, parents and productive citizens. It is
a life that saw Wasdin forge friendships with two men he achieved
enormous success with - Joe Williams and Rick Stottler. With
Williams, Wasdin reached the pinnacle of coaching in college
basketball, taking Jacksonville University to the 1970 NCAA
Championship Game against the most powerful program in college
sports history - John Wooden's UCLA Bruins. The account of that
season, and especially that game, captures the controversy and
excitement that surrounded it. Wasdin then moved from an assistant
coach to a successful tenure as JU's head coach. It is a life that
saw Wasdin leave coaching to join Stottler in business and
development, shaping both lives and a stretch of area along the
East Coast of Florida that with his help came to be known as the
Space Coast. It is a life lived in full, and a life story worth
reading.
In It for the Long Run is ultrarunner Damian Hall's story of
running a first marathon aged thirty-six, dressed as a toilet, and
representing Great Britain four years later. His midlife-crisis
running problem escalated to 100-mile ultramarathons and
record-breaking bimbles, culminating in his 261-mile Pennine Way
run in July 2020. In 1989, Mike Hartley set a record/Fastest Known
Time (FKT) for the Pennine Way, running Britain's oldest National
Trail in two days and seventeen hours, without stopping for sleep.
Hartley's record stood for thirty-one years, until two attempts
were made on it in two weeks in the summer of 2020. First, American
John Kelly broke Hartley's record by thirty-four minutes. Then Hall
knocked another three hours off Kelly's time. Hall used his
record-bothering run to highlight concerns for our climate and
ecological emergency: his attempt was carbon negative, he created
no plastic waste, and he and his pacing runners collected litter as
they went, while also raising money for Greenpeace. A vegan, Hall
used no animal products on his attempt. Scrawled on his arm in
permanent marker was 'F F F', standing for Family, Friends, Future.
Packed with dry wit and humour, In It for the Long Run tells of
Hall's nine-year preparation for his attempt, and of the run
itself. He also gives us an autobiographical insight into the
deranged, custard-splattered, hedgehog-dodging world of
ultramarathon running and record attempts.
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