Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in Sports

After a decade-long addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, Charlie Engle hit bottom with a near-fatal six-day binge that ended in a hail of bullets. As Engle got sober, he turned to running, which became his lifeline, his pastime, and his salvation. He began with marathons, and when marathons weren't far enough he began to take on ultramarathons, races that went for 35, 50, and sometimes hundreds of miles, traveling to some of the most unforgiving places on earth to race.

Aron Ralston, an experienced twenty-seven-year-old outdoorsman, was on a days solitary hike through a remote and narrow Utah canyon when he dislodged an eight-hundred- pound boulder that crushed his right hand and wrist against the canyon wall. Emerging from the searing pain, Aron found himself completely stuck. No one knew where he was; no one was coming to rescue him. With scant water and food, and a cheap pocketknife his only tool, he eliminated his options one by one.

Los Angeles native and longtime sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times, Scott Howard-Cooper draws on more than a hundred interviews and extensive access to many of the principal figures, including Wooden’s family, to deliver a rich narrative that reveals the turmoil at the heart of this storied college basketball program.

Audie Award, Business/Educational, 2016. America's favorite football player turned morning talk show host, Michael Strahan, reads his book of motivational advice on how to turn up the heat and go from good to great in pursuit of your personal ambition. Inspiring and chock full of advice that will help you make significant strides toward pursuing your dream, Wake Up Happy is a book no one, young or old, male or female, will want to miss.

You may know him as an NFL All-Pro or as an elite magician who made the finals of America’s Got Talent. But Jon Dorenbos says that what he does is not who he is. Who he is is someone forced, at the most tender of ages, to coach himself into turning tragedy to triumph. One morning in August 1992, when Jon was 12 years old and living a seemingly idyllic childhood in suburban Seattle, he woke up for baseball camp. His dad waved good-bye. Later that day, Jon heard the news: His father had murdered his mother in the family’s three-car garage.

This inspiring memoir from sports and cultural icon Bill Walton recounts his devastating injuries and amazing recoveries, set in the context of his UCLA triumphs under John Wooden, his storied NBA career, and his affinity for music and the Grateful Dead.

Phil Mickelson is one of the most compelling figures in sports. For more than three decades he has been among the best golfers in the world, and his unmatched longevity was exemplified at the 2021 PGA Championship, when Mickelson, on the cusp of turning fifty-one, became the oldest player in history to win a major championship. In this raw, uncensored, and unauthorized biog­raphy, Alan Shipnuck captures a singular life defined by thrilling victories, crushing defeats, and countless controversies.

In The Smart Money, Michael Konik takes listeners behind the veil of secrecy shrouding the most successful sports gambling operation in America, to its innermost sanctum. He reveals how they, and he, got rich by beating the Vegas lines and, ultimately, the multi-million-dollar offshore betting circuit. He details the perks and perils of a lifestyle in which staking inordinate sums of money on the outcome of a game, sometimes as much as $1 million on a single event, is a normal part of doing business.

He's wrestled as "Stunning" Steve Austin, The Ringmaster, and even his own name, Steve Williams. But to fans he is and will always be Stone Cold Steve Austin. His quick wit and colorful use of language combined with his everyman character captured the hearts of fans worldwide. It was Steve's ability inside the ring and his quick-witted responses that lead to his becoming one of the most popular WWE Superstars of all time.

For years the world has followed his progress, from teen sensation in Sydney to bona fide phenom in Athens, and now as a living Olympic legend in Beijing with a peerless record of gold medals, more than any Olympic athlete throughout history. In No Limits, Michael Phelps - the greatest competitor we've seen since Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Lance Armstrong - will share with listeners the secrets to his remarkable success, from training to execution.

Tiger Woods’ long descent into a personal and professional hell reached bottom in the early hours of Memorial Day in 2017. Woods’ DUI arrest that night came on the heels of a desperate spinal surgery, just weeks after he told close friends he might never play tournament golf again. The former paragon of discipline now found himself hopelessly lost and out of control, exposed for all the world to see. That episode could have marked the beginning of Tiger’s end. It proved to be the opposite.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1943, by the age of 11 Arthur Ashe was one of the state's most talented Black tennis players. Jim Crow restrictions barred Ashe from competing with Whites. Still, in 1960 he won the National Junior Indoor singles title, which led to a tennis scholarship at UCLA. He became the first African American to play for the US Davis Cup team in 1963, and two years later he won the NCAA singles championship. In 1968, he won both the US Amateur title and the first US Open title, rising to a number-one national ranking.

From Bill Cowher, the Super Bowl-winning, Hall-of-Fame Pittsburgh Steelers coach, and cohost of CBS’ The NFL Today, comes a poignant, inspirational story about football, family, and love.

For a long time, Carmelo Anthony’s world wasn’t any larger than the view of the hoopers and hustlers he watched from the side window of his family’s first-floor project apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He couldn’t dream any bigger than emulating his older brothers and cousin, much less going on to become a basketball champion on the world stage.

Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. Most famously, he won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw’s New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind.

Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries, there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s. Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for The Boston Globe who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to1986. It was a time when reporters travelled with professional teams—flying the same commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same hotels. Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences, Shaughnessy takes us inside the legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams.

Scottie Pippen has been called one of the greatest NBA players for good reason. Simply put, without Pippen, there are no championship banners - let alone six - hanging from the United Center rafters. There’s no Last Dance documentary. There’s no “Michael Jordan” as we know him. The 1990s Chicago Bulls teams would not exist as we know them. So how did the youngest of 12 go from growing up poor in the small town of Hamburg, Arkansas, enduring two family tragedies along the way, to become a revered NBA legend?

Discover the remarkable life of Roberto Clemente - one of the most accomplished - and beloved - baseball heroes of his generation from Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss.

Hall of Fame football coach Jimmy Johnson’s house isn’t on the way to anything. Yet, his private sanctuary on the Florida Keys’ Islamorada islands is a popular destination to which college and professional coaches, general managers, and team owners regularly trek to seek advice—how to build a positive team culture, draft elite players, balance work and family life, and lead a team to win. Why? Because Jimmy Johnson has done it all. Now, written with sports journalist Dave Hyde, Johnson shares a candid account of his life experiences that have turned him into a legend in the coaching world.

LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he’s in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. The reigning king of the game and the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, LeBron wears the crown like he was born with it. Yet his ascent has been anything but effortless and predetermined—the truth is vastly more interesting than that. LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict paints a vivid picture of LeBron’s epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star.