Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Sports History

Today, millions of women and girls around the world enjoy running and entering races. It wasn't always so. First Ladies of Running tells the inspiring stories runners who refused to give up despite the cultural and sports barriers they faced. Legends such as Doris Brown, Francie Larrieu, Mary Decker, Jackie Hansen, Miki Gorman, and Grete Waitz are chronicled by Runner's World editor Amby Burfoot.

Who won the first Daytona 500? Fans still debate whether it was midwestern champion Johnny Beauchamp, declared the victor at the finish line, or longtime NASCAR driver Lee Petty, declared the official winner a few days after the race. Author John Havick interviewed scores of people, analyzed film of the race, and pored over newspaper accounts of the event. He uses this information and his deep knowledge of the sport as it worked then to determine what probably happened. But he also tells a much bigger story.

Seasoned pitchers Tom Glavine and Mike Mussina have seen it all in the Major Leagues, and both entered 2007 in search of individual milestones and one more shot at the World Series - Glavine with the Mets, Mussina five miles away with the Yankees. Feinstein provides a true insider's look at the pressure cooker of sports at the highest level.

The stories of thirteen Black Minor League baseball players during the post-Jackie Robinson era, from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, who were figuratively and literally left behind even as both baseball and the country claimed a newfound racial progressiveness.

In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet - and Paris Review sports columnist - Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it's divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams.

In Drama in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali's last bout. Through interviews with many of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks short of his 40th birthday, a seriously diminished Ali stepped through the ropes one more time to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick.

During the height of the Cold War, a group of small-town young men would lead their underdog hockey team from the little country of Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, the juggernaut in their sport. As they battled on the ice, the young players would keep their people's quest for freedom alive, and forge a way to fight back against the authoritarian forces that sought to crush them. Freedom to Win tells a story that ranges from iconic moments in history to courageous individual stories.

In Written in the Snows, renowned local skiing historian Lowell Skoog presents a definitive and visually rich history of the past century of Northwest ski culture, from stirring and colorful stories of wilderness exploration to the evolution of gear and technique. He traces the development of skiing in Washington from the late 1800s to the present, covering the beginnings of ski resorts and competitions, the importance of wild places in the Olympic and Cascade mountains (including Oregon's Mount Hood), and the friluftsliv, or open-air living spirit, of backcountry skiing.

The 1972 Miami Dolphins had something to prove. Losers in the previous Super Bowl, a ragtag bunch of overlooked, underappreciated, or just plain old players, they were led by Don Shula, a genius young coach obsessed with obliterating the reputation that he couldn't win the big game. And as the Dolphins headed into only their seventh season, all eyes were on Miami. For the last time, a city was hosting both national political conventions, and the backdrop to this season of redemption would be turbulent.

For a race as long as the mighty Tour (three weeks of testing the limits of human endurance), to have the ultimate victory decided by a margin of just eight seconds almost boggles the mind. But that's exactly what happened between American legend Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon. After more than 2,000 miles in the saddle, it remains the smallest margin of victory in the Tour's 100-plus-year history.

In a mere twelve months, between May 2020 and May 2021, horse racing's most recognizable face—Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert—had five horses that failed postrace drug tests. Among those was the 2021 Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit. While the incident was a major scandal in the Thoroughbred racing world, it was only the latest in a series of drug-related infractions among elite athletes. Milton C. Toby addresses the historical and contemporary context of the Thoroughbred industry's most pressing issue.

From 1976 to 1978, the Cornell men's lacrosse team went on a tear. Winning two national championships and posting an overall record of 42-1, the Big Red, coached by Richie Moran, were the class of the NCAA game. Christian Swezey tells the story of the rise of this dominant lacrosse program. Pulling from interviews with more than ninety former coaches and players from Cornell and its rivals, We Showed Baltimore paints a vivid picture of lacrosse in the 1970s and how Moran and the Big Red helped create the game of today.

The greatest tennis match ever played pitted the dominant Don Budge against the seductively handsome Baron Gottfried von Cramm. This deciding 1937 Davis Cup match, played on the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon, was a battle of titans: the world's number one tennis player against the number two; America against Germany; democracy against fascism. For five superhuman sets, the duo's brilliant shotmaking kept the Centre Court crowd—and the world—spellbound.

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy, brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman to lecture at the Sorbonne, and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London.

Golfing With Dad is a heartwarming collection of golf's best players' favorite memories with their fathers and how those memories shaped them not only as players but as the men and women they are today. Many professional golfers have been greatly influenced by their fathers, and some of the very best have contributed interviews to this special book, edited by longtime Golf magazine editor David Barrett.

Endzone tells the story of how college football's most successful and respected program nearly lost it all in less than a decade and entirely of its own doing. It is a story of hubris, greed, and betrayal, a tale more suited to Wall Street than the world's top public university.

Each week, when Sports Illustrated's 21 million readers open up their magazine, many turn right to the last page - because that's where to find SI's most popular feature: the Life of Reilly column, written by best-selling author Rick Reilly. This new collection includes 100 of Reilly's favorite columns from the last six years, along with an introduction by Lance Armstrong.

For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and especially on the radio, garnered for him legions of fans who would not miss his play-by-play accounts. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and many of today's most famous sportscasters were Glickman disciples. In Marty Glickman, Jeffrey S. Gurock showcases the life of this important contributor to American popular culture.

Since 2015, Fred Segal has chronicled "unprophetic" sports predictions on the internet. His Freezing Cold Takes social media pages feature quotes and predictions from members of the sports world that have aged poorly or were, in hindsight, flat-out wrong. The pages have become a guilty pleasure for hundreds of thousands of sports fans who love to see sports media's infamous "hot takes" that went cold.

Take a rollicking tour through the sports world of 1996, when debuts, comebacks, movies, and pop culture crossover changed the sports landscape forever. From college to the Olympics to the pros; from the NBA to golf, tennis, and boxing, 1996 was home to athletes and teams who were among the best marketed, most beloved, colorful, and greatest in history. Sportswriter and author Jon Finkel uncovers the stories behind the stories while interviewing a who's who of '96ers to reveal in thrilling detail how their collective influence on sports and pop culture still resonates to this day.