Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 25 of 52 matches in All Departments
With 363 victories, Warren Spahn is the winningest lefty in baseball history. Over 21 years, he won 20 or more games 13 times, was a 17-time All Star, won a Cy Young-award, then, of course, was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Spahn was also a war hero, serving in World War II and awarded the Purple Heart. To say Spahn lived a storied life is an understatement. In Warren Spahn, author Lew Freedman tells the story of this incredible lefty. Known for his supremely high leg kick, Spahn became one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. However, the road wasn't as easy as it would seem. Struggling in his major-league debut at age twenty, manager Casey Stengel demoted the young left. It would be four years before Spahn would return to the diamond, as he received a calling of a different kind--one from his country. Enlisting in the Army, Spahn would serve with distinction, seeing action in the Battle of the Bulge and the Ludendorff Bridge, and was awarded a battlefield commission, along with a Purple Heart. Upon his return to the game, he would take the league by storm. Spahn dominated for over two decades, spending twenty years with the Braves (both Boston and Milwaukee), as well as a season with the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants. Pitching into his mid-forties, he would throw two no-hitters at the advanced ages of thirty-nine and forty. From his early days in Buffalo and young career, through his time and the military and all the way to the 1948 Braves and "Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain," author Lew Freedman leaves no stone unturned in sharing the incredible life of this pitching icon, who is still considered the greatest left-handed pitcher to ever play the game.
The Whalers are the only football team above the Arctic Circle: 330 north to be exact, a place with no grass, no trees, and plenty of permafrost. Of the 44 Eskimo, Tongan, Samoan, Asian-American, African-American and Caucasian teenagers who signed up for this experiment, only four had ever played organized football before. Seasoned journalist Lew Freedman captures this inspiring story.
AÂ one-stop record containing everything White Sox fans want to know about their favorite baseball team, this resource is packed with anecdotes, history, explanations of traditions, statistics, trivia, and photos.
Loyola University Chicago was ahead of its time when racial matters were forefront in a long overdue revolution in civil rights. The Ramblers of the 1962-1963 NCAA college basketball season were pioneers in race relations in sport, though most of the time they were simply playing the sport they loved. When the NCAA tournament began in March, the Ramblers engaged in a series for the ages, daring to be the first NCAA Division I school to play five black athletes on the court at once and capturing the most prestigious title in college basketball at a time when states below the Mason-Dixon line still had laws on the books preventing black and white athletes from mixing even in pick-up games. Records were set, rivals faced and one of the most famous and significant contests in college basketball playoff history played out in what incidentally became a model showcase for race relations. Nearly every time the Ramblers took the court, the game was unique in its magnitude. Relying significantly on exclusive interviews with surviving players, now in their seventies, Lew Freedman chronicles the entire journey, the adventure of the season that bound tight for a lifetime the group of men who lived through it.
The quarterback pass is one of the leading offensive components of today's National Football League and college football's top level of play. This was not always the case. In early American football, the strategy focused entirely on advancing the ball one running play at a time, with the player tucking the then-roundish ball on his hip and sprinting ahead until tackled by a swarm of defenders. The revolution that transformed the sport began in 1906, when passing was first legalized. The passing weapon made the game safer, altered strategy, turned the quarterback into a key offensive player, and made possible the high-scoring games of today. Lew Freedman traces football's passing game from its inception to the present, telling the tale through the stories of the quarterbacks whose arms carried (and threw) the changes forward. Freedman relies especially on the biography of i?1/2Slingin' Sammyi?1/2 BaughaEURO"who hailed from Sweetwater, TexasaEURO"as a framework. Baugh, perhaps the greatest all-around football player in history, came along at just the right time to elevate the passing game to unprecedented importance in the eyes of the sports world.
Hoyt Wilhelm's intriguing baseball career lasted two decades. A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, the eight-time All-Star from Huntersville, North Carolina was a standout for the New York Giants, Baltimore Orioles, Chicago White Sox and Atlanta Braves, though he did not reach the majors until he was nearly 30.He pitched a no-hitter as a starter, won as many as 15 games a season, was the first reliever to win more than 100 games and save more than 200, and broke Cy Young's record for most games on the mound. Along the way, he relied almost entirely on his baffling skill with a rare weapon of choice--the knuckleball. This first full-length biography covers the life and career of the first relief pitcher in the Hall of Fame.
For the first time, Alaska musher and tribal leader Mike Williams shares his remarkable life story with veteran sports writer Lew Freedman. Williams is a man of many parts, a sports figure, a government figure, a leader of his people, a husband, a father, and a Native man with one foot firmly planted in the twenty-first century and another firmly planted in the roots of a culture that dates back 10,000 years in Alaska. Williams competed in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race fifteen times, and was once the only Yup’ik Eskimo musher, a symbol to all Natives around the state. Although he was never a top contender for the Iditarod title, he was a competitor whom everyone cheered because he resolved that to shed light on one of Alaska’s greatest threats to the health and future of its Native people, he would carry in his dog sled pages—pounds worth—of signatures of people who had pledged sobriety. A Yup’ik Eskimo, Williams saw firsthand how alcohol could devastate people as surely as if they had contracted a deadly flu: each of his brothers had succumbed to alcohol-related accidents, incidents, or illnesses. Williams describes how he recovered from his dependence on alcohol through religion, loved ones, and racing dogs. For many years Williams carried those sobriety pledges in his sled, focusing attention on a troubling, seemingly intractable problem. Williams gained national attention, being profiled by CNN, Sports Illustrated, and Good Morning America. Fellow Iditarod competitors have voted him “the most inspirational musher.â€
In IDITAROD ADVENTURES, mushers explain why they have chosen this rugged lifestyle, what has kept them in long-distance mushing, and the experiences they have endured along that unforgiving trail between Anchorage and Nome. Renowned sports writer Lew Freedman profiles 23 mushers—men, women, Natives, seasoned veterans, and some relatively new to the demanding sport, many of whom are so well-known in Alaska that fans refer to them only by their first names. The book also features interviews with administrators who organize the event and make sure it happens every year, volunteers, and others whose connection to the Iditarod is self-evident even if they don’t have an official title.
Lowell Thomas Jr. is a famed Alaskan who made his mark as a Bush pilot and by serving in state government, but who also has had a lifetime’s worth of adventures that have taken him around the world. Thomas, now eighty-nine, and living in Anchorage, is the son of one of the most widely known Americans of the twentieth century, and his connection to Lowell Thomas Sr. (1892-1981) enabled him to jump-start his life of adventure at a very early age. From the time he was fifteen, Lowell Thomas Jr. has been involved in a series of journeys that have seen him cross paths with many famous lives and take part in many historic events.
The Kenai is a world-class salmon river that attracts fishermen
from all over the world, but is also the "everyman" river of the
great fishing paradise of Alaska because of its accessibility. The
Kenai River is special not only because world-record salmon are
caught in its stunning green waters, but because it is on the road
system and thus can be accessed by the average fisherman, not
merely the well-to-do who pay huge sums to fish in remote Alaskan
areas controlled by private lodges and that are approachable only
by small planes.
William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917) rose from humble origins in Iowa to become one of the most famous and most photographed people in the world. He became a leading scout during the American Indian Wars, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a renowned show business fixture whose traveling Wild West exhibitions played to millions of spectators the world over for 30 years. He hobnobbed with presidents, kings, queens and European heads of state, befriending many legendary individuals of the West, from General George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull to Wild Bill Hickok and Annie Oakley. Aside from these achievements, Cody's most important legacy may be how he shaped the world's enduring views of the American West through his shows, which he considered to be educational events rather than entertainment. This biography is a fresh look at the life of Buffalo Bill.
Kenny Sailors was a basketball star, and the inventor of the jump
shot. He attended the University of Wyoming and was MVP in 1943 in
college AA basketball. After WWII, he spent five years as an early
player in the new NBA. As a youngster, Kenny was five-foot-seven
but his older brother was six-foot-two so when playing basketball,
Kenny had to jump up over his brother to get off a shot. That is
how the jump shot was born, and Kenny used it in college and
professional basketball. He played in Denver and several other
cities whose team names have now changed, but he also played for
the Boston Celtics with Bob Cousy. After he left the NBA, he moved
to Alaska and in 1965 settled in the Glennallen area, where he was
a fishing and hunting guide in the Wrangle Mountains for
thirty-five years. He now lives in Idaho, and his son lives and
flies aircraft from Antioch, California.
Here at last is the thrilling memoir of the legendary mountaineer Bradford Washburn, one of the last explorers and adventurers of the twentieth century. Drawing from decades of memories, journals, and an exquisite photographic collection, Washburn completes the self-portrait of a man drawn to altitude, from his first great climb of Mount Washington at age eleven, through numerous first ascents of peaks all over the world, to handily scaling a climbing wall at eighty-eight.      Indeed, Washburn also became renowned for his pioneering work in aerial photography, his dedication to science and cartography, his decades of leading Boston’s Museum of Science, and his close association with the National Geographic Society.      This mountaineering icon candidly offers an intimate look at a life devoted to the world’s highest places, to the friends who challenged the mountains with him, and to wife Barbara, who shared his adventures for nearly sixty-five years.
An early celebrity pitcher, Denton "Cy" Young (1867-1955) established supreme standards on the mound. A small-town Ohio farmer made good, he set Major League pitching records in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that will likely last forever. The winner of 511 games - nearly one hundred more than the second-ranked hurler - Young pitched the first perfect game of the modern era, as well as three no-hitters. His talents helped establish the American League in 1901. Among the Hall of Fame's first inductees, he remained a sought-after interviewee decades after retirement. A year after his death, the Cy Young Award was dedicated as baseball's most prestigious honor for pitchers.
Barbara Washburn never set out to become a mountaineering pioneer, but in 1947, defying social conventions, she became the first woman to climb Alaska's Mount McKinley.
LeBron James is simultaneously on the cutting edge of basketball greatness and as a cultural icon. Through the international exposure of the National Basketball Association and its televised games in more than 100 countries, and as a global marketing presence, the star of the Cleveland Cavaliers is rapidly becoming one of the world's most familiar faces. This biography traces the key events in the life of LeBron James during his dizzying rise to fame in high school to his emergence as the first overall pick in the NBA draft as an 18-year-old, to his carrying the underdog Cavaliers to the 2007 NBA Finals. Hyped relentlessly from the time he was a high school sophomore in Ohio, James has lived up to all advance billing and with his charm, smile, and extraordinary basketball skills. James' all-around talent and unselfishness on the court are the trademarks of his play that have made him one of the most feared scorers in the league, but also one of its most versatile rebounders and passers. This biography offers a well-rounded portrait James from the difficulties encountered being raised by a single mother and overcoming poverty, which at times caused the family to move from home to home. Lew Freedman of the "Chicago Tribune" chronicles the milestones in the life of LeBron James during his dizzying rise to fame. Also highlighted are James' remarkable endorsement deals, particularly his $90 million deal with Nike. The volume is rounded out with a timeline and a bibliography of print and electronic sources to provide suggested readings for students and sports fans alike.
Picking up where the best-selling IDITAROD CLASSICS left off, MORE
IDITAROD CLASSICS introduces readers to more of the men and women
who brave the 1,100-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from
Anchorage to Nome. And do they ever have stories to tell In their
own words, champions and lesser knowns share their very best
stories--how they came to love the race, train their dogs and
themselves, and battle all manner of winter hardships challenging
the elements in what some have called the most extreme
long-distance competition in the world. |
You may like...
Stuff We Wish We Knew Before Getting…
Mo Grootboom, Phindi Grootboom
Paperback
Hykie Berg: My Storie van Hoop
Hykie Berg, Marissa Coetzee
Paperback
|