Review: The Playing Lesson (2025)

By Michael Bamberger

Michael Bamberger has the bug. The golfing bug, that is. 

He's always enjoyed all of the various parts of the sometimes addictive game, which doesn't put him in a particularly small club. But Bamberger had something else going for him. He could write - and that eventually landed him a job at Sports Illustrated magazine. That led to several good golf books, including one called "Men in Green" - profiles of golf's greatest generation. If you couldn't be one of the best players in the world, playing the best golf courses in the world, well, hanging around people who are wasn't a bad substitute. 

What's more, there would be the odd fringe benefit - like personally playing some interesting courses. How many people take "business trips" in which carrying golf clubs along is part of the deal?

Bamberger now is in his mid-60s, and is a writer for Golf.com. Last year, he decided to take a look at golf in a variety of different ways. From there, Bamberger was off on a journey through the golfing world - almost literally. He takes the reader along for the pleasant ride in "The Playing Lesson."

The supposed goal - "excuse" might be a better word - for the author was to experience golf in a variety of new ways. Therefore, Bamberger volunteered to work at a tournament. He was a caddie at another. Michael took part in several pro-ams on the men's and women's tours at various levels. He talked to a variety of people along the way, including instructors and equipment pros.

On one level, this gives Bamberger a chance to offer opinions on the golf scene, past and present. It's a complicated situation at the moment, with the LIV and PGA Tours fighting for attention, power and money (those three items go together). The viewpoints are offered in no particular order, along the lines of a typical long conversation with someone. 

On the other hand, this is a chance to feed a golfer's universal quest: play better. So Bamberger is always on the lookout for tips on improving his game from anyone who will stop to think about it. Who couldn't use a little advice on putting from Brad Faxon, one of the best n the golf business among pros in that particular aspect of golf? 

It's all goes down quite smoothly, like a fast round of golf on a perfect summer day. Bamberger is good company, with a lifetime of memories to draw from. There are only a couple of occasions when the story bogs down a little bit. One is a good-sized discussion on equipment specifications, which is a little dry for most. The ending is something of a tribute to his love of golf and to those who helped develop it in his life, which some might find a little syrupy.

The people who published "The Playing Lesson" obviously aren't fools. They put it in the stores shortly before Father's Day - and no doubt it was turned into a gift many times around the country. The recipients no doubt offered a big smile in return for the present, and promised to start reading it soon ... right after finishing 18 holes. (Take it from a guy whose father fit that description well.) 

If you fit into the world in which golf plays a big part of your life, then it will be as good as a birdie on a tough par-4. 

Four stars

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Review: Beyond Fast (2025)

By Sean Brosnan with Chris Lear and Andrew Grief

Welcome to the world of cross-country running. It's familiar, yet different. 

Most of us are familiar with running in competition, mostly in the form of events on a track (hence, track and field). A group of runners line up together, go a particular distance, and find out which one is the fastest. Conditions usually are ideal for running in terms of elevation, with flat surfaces and no elevation.

Cross country is a different animal. It comes from a childhood game in England in the middle of the 19th century, as kids would run through the countryside chasing their friends. Conditions in the current incarnation of the sport are often not ideal, since hills are expected and surfaces can vary. I once saw a 5-kilometer race held in a park that had a layer of snow on the grass in a sub-freezing temperature, which meant it didn't take much for the course to become a sea of mud. Guys turned up at the finish line crying. You wouldn't believe how many shoes got left behind on turns.

Cross-country events usually are staged in the fall while their track counterparts go in the spring. There are no formal NCAA championships in XC, the usual abbreviation. It's not in the Olympics, either. Cross country isn't associated with big crowds;  usually it's family, friends, and runners past and present watching.

Sean Brosnan takes us into the world of high school cross country in his book, "Beyond Fast." It's the story of how, in automotive terms, he took a team from 0 to 100 almost overnight. 

Brosnan had more or less wandered through life until he arrived at Newbury Park High School in 2016. He had been a very good runner, but not quite good enough to challenge for national fame and glory. Brosnan loved running through, and he bounced around the country looking for information and the chance to interact with the best in the business. Eventually, he landed at a high school that had been decidedly mediocre. It hadn't reached the state finals in California cross country in about a quarter of a century. 

He promised he'd change all that right from Day One, and then went about the business of doing it. There was plenty of work involved, as there always is with running. But the athletes bought in, and - sure enough - some success followed. Suddenly it was cool to be a runner, and Newbury Park got better and better. Good runners became relatively great runners, and the rest of the group was inspired to try to keep up as best as it could. One of those runners was an Olympian in 2024, and the team won three straight unofficial high school national championships - breaking records for scholastic athletes along the way. Brosnan does something of a play-by-play about how it all happened. 

The book generates one key thought along the way. Go to any area in the country, and you'll find a school and a program that is something of a dynasty in something. There's a good coach behind it in most cases, but it's tough to know how much credit to give him or her. After all, the athletes are the ones doing the work. Almost certainly, success breeds success in high school sports. It's cool to be on a state champion, and the younger kids who are top athletes might pick that sport over a less successful one.

From there, Brosnan obviously needed a little help for his methods to succeed. The proper attitude and support from parents and athletes are necessary. When Brosnan decided to take his team to a higher elevation for training during four weeks of summer vacation, the runners had to be willing to do it and their parents had to be on board financially (as well willing to do some driving to see their kids every so often). It sounds like Newbury Park is in a reasonably wealthy area, and that must have helped. But some family vacations and summer jobs might have been sacrificed. This might have been a perfect spot for Brosnan to try out his methods. The coach pounded the message that his runners could be great if they did the work, and many wound up that way by any standard.

Along the way in those championship years, Brosnan had to deal with Covid-19 for a couple of them. Even in a sport involving somewhat solitary runners, the coach's drive for excellence may have bent (but not broken) the rules just a little bit. He certainly fought for his athletes with administrators and sanctioning groups along the way.

Brosnan teamed up with Chris Lear and Andrew Grief for the writing of this book. It's a straight-forward account of the rise of the Newbury Park program and of his life, which is far from conventional. Some of the runners themselves even have the chance to express their stories along the way, which is a nice touch. 

The story that's printed ends in 2022, when Brosnan decided to leave high school coaching to take a similar job at UCLA. But this book is coming out in 2025, so what happened in the meantime? Brosnan only lasted a year coaching the Bruins' distance runners before UCLA fired him. He has said he believes he was fired because there were allegations that he tampered with runners from other schools before they entered the transfer portal. It's tough to tell about what happened there; this isn't the Alabama football program when it comes to media scrutiny. There's no sign that Brosnan has landed a full-time coaching job in the two years since his departure from Westwood. That's all a little disquieting from a distance.    

"Beyond Fast" ought to interest those who have a strong connection with cross country, particularly at the high school level. It's always good to read about how championship teams come together. More casual readers, though, might get a little bogged down at the description of training schedules and races. In other words, the book falls into a very cozy niche without room for most. 

Three stars

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Book Review: Baddest Man (2025)

By Mark Kriegel

You wouldn't expect a biography of Mike Tyson to be boring. 

But put it in the hands of a skilled reporter and writer like Mark Kriegel, and you truly have something special. 

That's a short description of "Baddest Man," which in itself is a shortened version of the phrase "The Baddest Man on the Planet" - one of Tyson's nicknames during the course of his career.  Such a description used to come automatically when someone was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, which Tyson was back in the day. An old-fashioned way of saying it was "He can lick any man in the house." 

These days, no one has been able to say that without a possible argument. There are three or four heavyweight boxing champions these days, and none of them at a given moment can be identified by most sports fans. The greed that caused boxing officials to split up the title into parts in an attempt to have more title fights caught up with the sport quickly. 

Therefore, it's a little easy to become nostalgic about Mike Tyson, although the accompanying noise that came with his years in the spotlight. were overwhelming for all concerned at times. Especially Tyson. He had quite a run, keeping the public's attention from 1985 until 2005 even as parts of his life were crumbling. 

Tyson came out of Brooklyn with a father that dropped out of sight pretty quickly, and with a mother who was willing to do almost anything to keep the family together in some form or another - even if meant a spiral downward in their living conditions. Mike was much more interested in an education from the streets than he was from the schools. Tyson was said to be arrested 38 times by the age of 13. The fact that he was built like a fire hydrant made it easy in some ways to take liberties with others, and he ended in the government system that tries (and often fails) to straighten out the lives of teens.

An unhappy life and a young death usually is the end product of such a combination, but Tyson received an unexpected lifeline in the form of an invitation to spend time with legendary boxing manager Cus D'Amato in upstate New York. D'Amato had heard that Tyson had some boxing ability, and brought him into his home. 

There Tyson fine-tuned his boxing skills, with D'Amato telling anyone that would listen that Mike was destined to be a great champion. Once he got in the ring for formal matches, people started to understand D'Amato's enthusiasm. This was someone who could clobber almost anyone who was matched up with him. Certainly he had a chance to rank with the great sluggers in heavyweight history, like George Foreman and Sonny Liston. Those are the types of fighters who generate buzz, which leads to ticket sales, which leads to dollars floating around. 

This being boxing, of course, people flocked to take advantage of that situation. The history of the financial side of the sport is one where others try to take money away from those who actually earn it, while the fighters themselves usually aren't financially sophisticated enough to fend them off. Tyson made plenty of money ... but not as much as he should have earned. The in-fighting in that sense was tougher for Tyson than it was in the ring itself. He won three championship belts. The book comes to an end just as the champ needs about 90 seconds to knock out Michael Spinks - the only legitimate threat that was left to him. As we know now, Tyson had few new worlds to conquer, and he let the ones he had get away eventually.   

The research here is extraordinary. There are several details in Tyson's life that come out here, and the reader must ask the question, "How did Kriegel find that out?" He tracked down almost everyone, and also has a variety of other sources available - such as Tyson's own volumes of his autobiography. The authenticity is present throughout the book.

The Mike Tyson we meet here has some contradictions built into his mind. At times he's a bully and a narcissist, but at other times he capable of loyalty and kindness. Tyson obviously knew he missed out on a more normal childhood, and it sounds like he was longing for one that era. It's also clear that Tyson was not unintelligent but simply uneducated. It would be easy to wonder what might have happened to him had he grown up in better circumstances. 

Along those lines, Kriegel starts his book with something of a final chapter. Mike is in the present day, playing tennis dad while watching a daughter practice. It couldn't be more "normal." But who could have predicted it?

Kriegel wrote superb biographies of Joe Namath, Ray Mancini and Pete Maravich. He told a former coworker of his and mine that he enjoyed probing the father-son relationship in his books. It wasn't present in Tyson's life, so "Baddest Man" is a slight change of direction for the author. Even so, this book might be even better than his other three works. 

Five stars

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Review: Big Loosh (2025)

By Jim Leeke

Let's start this review of "Big Loosh: The Unruly Life of Ron Luciano" with a story.

When Luciano was pushing one of his many books, he even took a half-hour to appear on my sports talk show back in the day. I knew that Ron had umpired in Buffalo when the Bisons were playing in War Memorial Stadium in the International League back in the 1960s. I asked if he had any particular memories of those days. 

As a matter of fact, he did. It seemed that that was a particularly loud woman who sat behind home plate back then every night. She seemed to think it was her job to criticize the umpires, no matter what happened in the game. "That pitch was outside!" "He was safe!" "You guys are terrible." And on and on it went. 

Ron and his crew grew tired of it all. Then they received a tip that the woman was a breakfast waitress at a suburban restaurant. So the three umpires got up early one morning and visited the restaurant, and they gave it to her with all sorts of orders. "These pancakes are cold." "I need more coffee." "How did you burn the toast so badly." "Where's the bill?" And so on. Finally, the woman came over to their table. "Guys, if you leave this place right now, I promise that I will never yell at you at a game again."

They left, and she kept her word. In fact, she became the umpires' best friend. She always said hello before the game, and would bring them a freshly baked pie to start the homestand. 

The rest of the 30-minute show was fun too. But that's a side of Luciano that doesn't really turn up in "Big Loosh." It's a straight biography about a surprisingly complicated man. 

If you were a baseball fan, it was tough to avoid Luciano during the 1970s and 1980s. He seemed like an unlikely choice to be a celebrity umpire. Ron came out of the Binghamton area as a young man large enough to receive a scholarship as a lineman on the football team at Syracuse University. Injuries were a problem there, but he was still good enough to be drafted by the Detroit Lions. But injuries were an issue there too, and he bounced through Minnesota before landing with the Buffalo Bills for two games in the American Football League. Yup, more injuries. Luciano's pro career was over before it started. 

What next? He ended up at umpire school, and he happened to be good at it. Who is going to argue with a man big enough to play defensive tackle in pro football? Luciano was good enough to work some of the game's Crown Jewels, like the All-Star Game and the playoffs. Yes, he didn't get along well with Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, but then again no umpire did. Luciano also showed a little flair with his work, sometimes using a pistol-shooting gesture to call a runner out instead of the traditional thumb going up. The fans seemed to like it, and Ron liked the attention - although baseball still had a tradition-bound reputation at that point, and forced separation seemed likely.

NBC called at just the right time, and Luciano signed up for work as the analyst for backup "Game of the Week" on Saturdays - in the days when only two regular-season games were nationally televised per week. The backup game was the broadcast that went into blacked-out markets, or was used during rain delays with the primary game. (Kids, ask your parents for a further explanation of all that if necessary.) The relationship lasted a short time; as he put it, by the time he got done at NBC, it was behind Atari in the ratings. From there, Luciano moved into the unlikely position of author. He was always naturally funny, and he knew how to tell a story, so "The Umpire Strikes Back" became a hit. There were four more books along those lines. 

But the literary gravy train eventually ended, and Luciano became a bit lost. His sporting goods store back home rose and fell along the way, and after a while he started receiving treatments for depression. Luciano committed suicide in 1995. 

In one sense, a straight-forward look at Luciano's life is a pretty good idea. Ron did have trouble keeping his facts straight, particularly when he was headed toward a punchline. Facts could be exaggerated beyond recognition. No, Luciano didn't eject Weaver every time they were in the same ballpark, although the possibility always seemed to be lurking in the background. It's also nice to see that Luciano really was a good umpire, particularly when he first arrived at the majors before fame started to turn his head a little. 

There's not much insight into what happened at the end, but Luciano was well out of the public eye at that point and probably wasn't giving too many clues to what he was thinking. But as co-author David Fisher told Leeke, "He didn't look or ask for any help because he didn't want to bother people." 

"Big Loosh" - a nickname picked up as a youth for obvious reasons - moves right along, a short book that tells the truth about this interesting man. That's fine. It's just that much of the fun came out of the story, and that guy that told the story about the waitress in Buffalo enjoyed a good laugh. It's easy to wish that side had come out a bit more.

Three stars

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Review: Rory Land (2025)

By Timothy M. Gay

It's difficult to read "Rory Land" and not think about how much the book would have changed had he written it a few months later ... or a few years later.

Timothy M. Gay obviously put a lot of effort in this biography of Rory McIlroy, one of the world's best and most famous golfers. The story line must have seemed set when it was finished, oh, probably late last year. Rory was the comet who blossomed into a superstar at an early age, only to develop the habit of not winning major championship soon after that. 

Then in April, McIlroy finally went out and slayed that dragon. He won the Masters title in slightly messy but a typically exciting way. The arc of the story has been altered, and we don't know where it's headed. 

It's easy to wonder, then, what the reaction of Gay might have been when McIlroy sank that last putt to win the playoff in Augusta. Certainly he couldn't have been upset that the subject of the soon-to-be-published biography was a topic of conversation around the golfing world for days, growing the fan base of the Northern Ireland native in the process. On the other hand, McIlroy is no longer the sympathetic equivalent of Sisyphus, the Greek mythology figure doomed to push a rock up a hill only to have it fall back down the slope.

McIlroy's golf career seems to have entered a new phase. Now he's one of the handful of golfers who have won the career Grand Slam - victories in the four major championships. It will be fascinating to see how McIlroy reacts to that. Free from the constant pressure of expectations, he may start winning majors with regularity through the peak of his playing days (at 36 as of this writing, he has some prime years left). On the other hand, he could relax a bit with the dragon slayed, even if he doesn't realize it at the time. It will be fascinating to watch.

Marketing matters aside, most of the book wouldn't be changed if it had been written this morning - so don't let that stop you if you're interested in McIlroy. He has had an uncommon life, with plenty of influencing factors ... starting with his birthplace.

McIlroy hails from Northern Ireland, born to a Catholic family in a mostly Protestant region. You probably know about the Troubles that took part in the world for many years. Rory's family tree has some difficult twists and turns, as Gay discovered, because of all that. But the situation has settled down a bit in the last 25 years ago. McIlroy never chose to make religion a big part of her life. He was too busy worrying about getting a tee time later in the week. If anything, the golfer became a unifying factor for both sides of the divide in that area. 

McIlroy was playing golf by age three, and dreaming at age seven of becoming a pro golfer someday. Upon reaching double digits, it was obvious that McIlroy was something of a prodigy and had a chance to be something special. His working class parents had to sacrifice a great deal to support their son, as they worked extra jobs and spent little on themselves. In his teens Rory was headed to the United States every so often to find better competition. 

McIlroy was a young man in a hurry by that point, and he wasn't too interested in books unless they were written by Nicklaus and Hogan. Rory left school and was playing in top events by the age of 16. He turned pro at 18 in 2007, and didn't need much time to make an impact. In 2009, Rory bought his parents a house and told them they'd never have to work another day in their lives. That promise certainly has been kept. 

McIlroy won four majors between 2011 and 2014 inclusive, and seemed to have a chance to be one of the all-time greats. Along the way, he's been very visible in the public eye, whether it's through endorsements or relationships (the tabloid press, you know). The 10-year drought changed the script a bit. He's still a great player, but perhaps not as good we thought he might be. McIlroy has become a thoughtful, interesting personality along the way, and it's easy to wonder what he might be like if taken the more traditional route of finishing high school and enrolling in college, But, as we know now, there's still some time to add to his life story.

Gay starts off a little slowly, trying to capture the whirl around McIlroy's life in recent years. The now-veteran has been involved in the "fight" between the PGA Tour in America and the Saudi's LIV Tour - all while trying to win a major. And there are a lot of golf shots described here, especially in describing the wins and near-misses. But for the most part, the author settles in nicely to presenting the story, aided by the occasional use of some hilarious footnotes. Gay - who has a couple of other good sports books to his credit - put in the hours of research to make this work, and it shows.

"Rory Lane" fills the assignment of showing what the first act of Rory McIlroy's life has been like. The book no doubt will increase your interest in following along as he takes it into the second act.

Four stars

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Review: When the Game Was War (2023)

By Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen deserves a lot of credit for his range. You just never know what book he might come up with next.

Cohen has written for a wide variety of publications - from the Wall Street Journal to the New Yorker to Rolling Stone.  Rich was the co-creator of an HBO series. His books including looks at the Rolling Stones and America's "banana king." Even the sports books are diverse, although it's fair to say they have a Chicago-bias in spots. Cohen has books about the Bears and Cubs to his credit. 

So what was he doing during the Pandemic? Thinking about basketball. In particular, the 1987-88 NBA season. You might remember that one if you are a basketball fan. There were four very good teams in that point in history, and all were in different stages of a hoop lifespan. The Boston Celtics still could be good, but they were getting old. The Los Angeles Lakers were a bit younger, but still had plenty in the tank for the moment. The Detroit Pistons were coming up from below, with a deep bench and a rough-and-tough style that left opponents bruised. The Chicago Bulls had Michael Jordan, but hadn't quite figured out how to reach the next level. 

Cohen admits at the very start of the book that Game Six of the NBA Finals turned him into a basketball fanatic. With Covid-forced time on his hands, he decided to write a book on that '87-88 season called "When the Game Was War."  The idea was to show that that year of basketball was the best in the NBA's history. That's a very difficult argument to win, but Cohen presents his best arguments here ... and brings enthsiasm with him.

It's no coincidence that the best teams had many of the best players; that's the way it often works in sports. The Lakers started with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and that doesn't account for fellow Hall of Famer James Worthy. The Celtics offered Larry Bird along with Robert Parish, Kevin McHale and Dennis Johnson. Detroit was led by Isiah Thomas, followed by Joe Dumars and Adrian Dantley with a bench that included Dennis Rodman. Chicago had Michael Jordan, enough said, with Scottie Pippin slowly learning how to play Robin to Jordan's Batman. 

Cohen centers on a few regular-season games, but that only serves a launching point for background information on the players and teams. He gets plenty of points for the amount of information he covers, including some new items that usually come up with the passing of time. So the story moves right along into the playoffs, where fans who matched Cohen's intensity in those days probably can recite the details of the key contests without much effort. 

The Celtics lost their chance to stay relevant in the title picture when Len Bias died in 1986. The Bulls didn't have the right pieces yet, but they figured to be a handful if they did. The Pistons probably were the best team, but sometimes the best team didn't always win. And the Lakers had enough know-how and a break or two at the end of games to emerge on top. 

Was it the best year ever? Sometimes it seemed like Cohen forces the argument a little bit, overstating the ability of some players and teams at certain points. For example, the Atlanta Hawks are given a great deal of respect for starting the season with a division lead over Detroit and Chicago. Even at 25-9, it's hard to say anyone thought the Hawks would be there when it mattered in the spring. 

Cohen also has a second cause on the side. He thinks Isiah Thomas has been badly underrated for what he did in his career. Thomas's reputation took some hits during the course of his career, particularly in an incident involving Larry Bird in the playoffs. He and Magic Johnson were in each other's way in this particular season too, and their friendship suffered. Johnson was always going to win that popularity contest. Cohen's argument probably isn't air-tight, but it's an interesting discussion. Thomas' status is another portion of a book that shows the author trying to make a case along the way. I'm a little of the "show me, don't tell me" school on such matters, but I'm willing to listen.

"When the Game Was War" is book that's filled with research, some of it through direct interviews and some of it through other sources. It reads quite quickly. You may not be convinced about the validity of Cohen's two points, but if you remember this era you'll find it to be quite an entertaining book.

Four stars

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Review: Movies With Balls (2024)

By Kyle Bandujo and Rick Bryson

Here's a starting point that's relatively indisputable: Most sports fans like sports movies. Admittedly, there's nothing like real-life drama that can't be made up by any screenwriter. But such films can be a good reminder of why we love sports - the last-second finish, the plucky underdog triumph, the unlikely relationship, and so on. 

Every so often, someone seems to come up with a way to group such movies together in a book. That brings us to "Movies With Balls," a publication from Kyle Bandujo and Rick Bryson.

This one has a particularly interesting genesis story. The two authors wondered during a dull moment what the ticket stubs from some of the great moments in sports movies might look like. In other words, they doodled with tickets from "The Natural," "Bad News Bears," "The Replacements," "Rocky IV," etc. To do that, they looked at comparable events from the time period and went to work. 

They did a lot of work too. There are 26 main movies covered here, plus 11 "second stringers" that missed the cut and only received a paragraph and ticket stub at the end. The authors threw out some of the other motions pictures that could be candidates, such as "Miracle" or "Rudy." Their theory was that since those films are based on real events, they have real ticket stubs and not fake ones. There are a variety of breakdowns of the individual movies included here. That includes a description of the movie itself, the big game/event that climaxes the film, an MVP, an analysis of a key character, some graphics of key plays, a post-movie news conference, and some other notes. 

You'd have to say Bandujo and Bryson really, really, really know these movies to give them this much thought. Lives must have been rearranged on short notice when a network aired "Days of Thunder." What's more, they obviously had a lot of fun with the assignment, and some of the writing makes the reader (meaning me, I guess) laugh out loud.

On the other hand, your level of interest may not match the authors' level. Most sports fans have their favorite movies that forces them to stop what they are doing when channel surfing. They might even have a DVD/VHS copy of a big favorite somewhere in the house. Those particular chapters will come across as interesting and well done.

But if, in the reader's opinion, the movie was watched once and forgotten about, then the level of interest won't match the amount of detail in the book. In my case, that would be such movies as "Kingpin," "The Karate Kid" and "Creed" - worth watching, certainly, but maybe not memorizing. Others might be missed altogether. In such cases, the reader doesn't really know what's going on ... and starts flipping pages quickly. If you've see such movies as "She's the Man" and "Hot Rod," you are unquestionably a major expert in this field.   

Therefore, "Movies with Balls" is something of an accordion when it comes to interest. There are those who will enjoy every page as it hits the sweet spot, and the book will stay near the television set indefinitely for them. ("Look, 'Teen Wolf' and its group of adults trying to look like high school students are on TBS!") Certainly some of the public reviews have been enthusiastic. Others who will skim through it in little time at all. So take a look. If this sounds like it fits your niche, it might be worth your time.

Three stars

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Review: All Roads Home (2024)

By Bryan Trottier with Stephen Brunt

The New York Islanders had one of the great dynasties in hockey history more than 40 years ago. The Islanders ripped off four straight Stanley Cup championships from 1980 to 1983. It might not have been appreciated as much then as it is now, as the Montreal Canadiens had won four straight Cups immediately before the Islanders' run. Still it was a great team and a great accomplishment. No one has duplicated it since then.

Right at the center, literally and figuratively, of those Islanders teams was Bryan Trottier. He was one of the league's best players in his time, a top scorer who also could play some defense too. Trottier had help of course. Mike Bossy, Denis Potvin, Billy Smith, Clark Gillies and a great "supporting cast" helped out as well. But Trottier might have been the most valuable player of the bunch. 

It's always good when someone from a great team takes the time to write a book about his sports life. It took Trottier a while, but he finally got around to the task about 30 years after his playing days were over. The book is called "All Roads Home." 

Almost right from the start, Trottier comes across as an extremely modest and good person here. He'd be quick to give the credit to his family for that. It's not a story that pops up in the sports section too often. Trottier was the son of a First Nation (think Native) father and an Irish-Canadian mother. The family bounced around the West of Canada and the United States quite a bit, but Saskatchewan played a large role in the story. There were always chores to be done before and after school for the Trottier kids on the ranch/farm. It wasn't always easy, but the family seemed to have food on the table day after day. 

Trottier seemed to avoid some of the abuse and discrimination in sports that often comes with an Aboriginal background. (For more on that sort of life, read Ted Nolan's book.) It should be noted that Trottier was a very good player right from his teen-age years. He dropped out of school to concentrate on hockey, and finished as a second-round draft choice of the Islanders in 1974. It took him a year to reach the NHL, but he was an almost immediate smash in the pros. Bryan had 95 points in his rookie year, and in his third season he started a streak of five straight 100-point seasons. 

After staying with the Islanders through 1990, the relationship suffered from a genial split. Trottier became a free agent, and had some offers before deciding he wanted to play with Mario Lemieux. Good move. The Penguins won Stanley Cup in 1990-91 and 1991-92, bringing Trottier's total as a player to six. Not many NHL players can say that; no wonder he was once named one of the NHL's top 100 all-time players. 

Trottier moved into the coaching business after that, and he had the usual career there with a lot of different stops. The best one came in 2000-01, when he was an assistant with the Colorado Avalanche. That was Stanley Cup No. 7, as the air he breathed became even more rare. The worst stop might have been his one chance at serving as a head coach with the New York Rangers. It came in 2002, and it was odd for Islanders fans to see one of their greatest players coaching the team's biggest rival. The job only lasted 54 games. 

That brings us to an important point of the book. There's no score-settling here, no anger. Obviously 54 games aren't much in trying to evaluate a head coach, but Rangers' general manager Glen Sather gets off without a quick slash in passing from Trottier. Bryan's first two wives receive similar treatment - generally good words and no bad ones.

That's part of a wider discussion that can be made about Trottier's book. There are surprisingly few stories about his teammates and coaches, which is why we're reading in the first place. The playoff wins go by quite quickly.

A couple of other portions of Trottier's story are missing completely. If memory serves, he was involved in some sort of scam with an agent and at some point declared bankruptcy. Several hockey people were robbed that way, and it might be instructive to others to hear what happened there. Bryan also was hired as an assistant coach of the Buffalo Sabres in 2014 under Nolan. The head coach was fired at the end of that season, and so was Trottier. There's not a word about that entire experience in the book. The Sabres were in turmoil then, and it would have been interesting to hear about what happened from an inside perspective. 

If Trottier was your favorite player growing up, you were in good company. Steve Yzerman of the Detroit Red Wings wore Trottier's No. 19 in the NHL, and eventually joined Bryan in the Hall of Fame. There's enough material in "All Roads Home" that shows Trottier was worthy of such admiration during his hockey life. The omissions are a little troubling, but the autobiography still ought to please those who took enjoyment of watching Trottier at his peak.

Three stars

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Review: The Magnificent Seven (2025)

By Mark Mehler and Jeff Tiberii

Final Four Weekend in men's college basketball in an appropriate time to be reading "The Magnificent Seven." 

It's a book about the so-called "blue bloods" - the class teams that seem to be good year after year after year. Would it be a Final Four without them?

Not really. The history tells the story about Duke, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA, North Carolina and Connecticut. In the 2000s, there have been exactly two years in which none of those seven teams reached the Final Four - 2013 and 2019. Footnote: No one reached that round in 2020, due to the pandemic. 

Therefore, when picking up a copy of the book, there's a good chance that it's going to be relevant. Sure enough, Duke popped up in the Final Four this time around. The Blue Devils lost in the semifinals, but represented themselves well until the final minutes of a loss to Houston. It happens, especially against good teams. 

Mark Mehler and Jeff Tiberii probably could have written a book on these seven universities that could have served as a major doorstop. They wisely cut the size down to have a breezy, often fun look at the teams, all of which won four NCAA titles in the course of three decades. (That was the standard for inclusion; Villanova, Michigan State and Louisville were the near-misses.)

If there's a common denominator besides winning on this list, it's a great coach that set the standard. Sometimes that coach is followed by other great coaches, once the tradition was established, and sometimes he is not. 

Jim Calhoun set the stage for Connecticut's run after his arrival  in 1986; Dan Hurley has followed in his footsteps nicely. Mike Krzyzewski's record at Duke puts him with the all-time greats. You might have heard about Bobby Knight at Indiana. Kansas' first basketball coach was James Naismith, who merely invented the game. He's also the only coach in Jayhawks' history to have a losing record. Roy Williams and Bill Self have done better. Adolph Rupp became a legend at Kentucky, Rick Pitino and John Calipari had success of their own there. North Carolina plays in a facility named after Dean Smith for a reason, and John Wooden set an impossibly high standard for success at UCLA - as his successors often discovered the hard way. Yes, they all had great players, but the coaches were the constant in their runs of success. 

If a reader is particularly interested in one of the seven schools, a little digging should produce a library filled with possibilities. But that reader might not know that much about the other six universities. That's the fun part - it's not so in-depth that a reader can get lost in the weeds. You are almost sure to learn a few things about all of the programs included here, which is the idea. Mehler and Iberii also are willing to be judgmental when necessary. They've done plenty of research and talked to some people on the record in order to obtain some fresh perspectives. 

Sure, a 240-page book like this on such history-filled programs might be Basketball Lite for some. The guess here, though, "The Magnificent Seven" will be a fun and informative read that won't overwhelm most people. That's the goal of a book like this, and it succeeds nicely that way. 

Four stars

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Review: The Front Runner (2025)

By Brendan O'Meara

Fifty years?

Yes. Fifty years.

It has been a half-century since Steve Prefontaine died in an auto accident in Oregon in 1975. That means he'd be 74 in 2025.  

For those who weren't around yet to know who Steve Prefontaine was, it's tough to explain. He might have been one of the greatest runners ever produced by America. Steve, or as most people called him, "Pre," held almost all of the United States' records in distance running at one time or another. 

But it wasn't a case of what Prefontaine did. It was how he did it. Steve really was a front-runner. He usually took the lead in races rather quickly, and buried the hopes of the competition in virtually no time at all. None of this last-second sprint to the finish stuff for Prefontaine. Most of his races were well over well before that. It's almost as if he were saying, "Do you have what it takes to stay with me? No? Bye."

Prefontaine remains something of a legend in track circles, with some books and two movies covering his career. Now Brendan O'Meara has revisited that era with his comprehensive book, "The Front Runner."  

This starts at the beginning, with Prefontaine's family life. It sure sounds like it wasn't exactly a household filled with love and happiness. "Mommy Dearest" had nothing on Steve's mother, who used to beat him when he did something that was perceived to be wrong. Sometimes the mother asked her husband to take care of disciplinary business with a strap. Steve's older sister (nine years) often protected her little brother, taking the hits in his place.

It's easy to think of Frank Shorter while reading this. Shorter had what looked like a peaceful childhood from a distance, but the future Olympic marathon champion had a monster of a father who tried to abuse most of the residents of a small town. Running became an escape for Shorter and Prefontaine, as they literally could run away from their troubles - at least for a while. Were there many other runners who, pardon the expression, followed that path?

It took a little while for Prefontaine to figure out what sport would be a good fit for him once he reached the high school years. Eventually, though, Steve ended up in running, and - what do you know? - when he started winning races, the beatings stop. That sounds a particularly effective motivating force. Prefontaine quickly moved up the ladder, and by the time of high school graduation he was clearly on a different level than any one else in his native Coos Bay, Oregon - and perhaps most places in the country. 

By the time he arrived at the fabled running program at the University of Oregon with its legendary coach Bill Bowerman, Prefontaine was ready for the next step. Here's how good he was: Steve was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at the age of 19 in 1970. Prefontaine rampaged his way through the college ranks with the goal of reaching the Olympics. He did make the 1972 American team that went to Munich, and finished fourth in the 5,000 meters. That spot is always a good news/bad news spot. Fourth in the world in anything is very impressive, but no one remembers who finished fourth in an Olympic event. 

Prefontaine finished up his eligibility at Oregon after that, which must have been something of an anti-climax. Today he'd be making enough money from outside sources that he could continue to run competitively for many more years. But back in those primitive (or, if you prefer, just plain stupid) days, athletes in the so-called Olympic sports had strict rules about compensation or almost any kind. Most athletes had to get on with the rest of their lives by finding work, just to pay the bills. 

Prefontaine fought the old system as best he could, and caused a few cracks with his words and actions. Again, ever the front-runner. While his death in 1975 stopped his personal quest in that area, the Amateur Athletic Union lost most of its power to determine eligibility by the end of that decade. Remember the first rule of amateurism: it's a way to keep money out of the hands of the people who actually earned it. Maybe Prefontaine would have gone on to win an Olympic medal or set a world record, the two missing ingredients on his resume.  

Author Brendan O'Meara certainly put in an effort for this one. He found more than 100 people who sat down for interviews on the subject of Prefontaine, and mined a variety of other sources. Obviously some of the people who were part of Steve's life back then aren't around to talk about it now. But I can't say the finished product is missing anything obvious in that sense. 

"The Front Runner" portrays a man who in a sense could be called track and field's James Dean. Prefontaine and Dean were both big, charismatic stars as a young age who were taken from us too soon. The book might have lost a little of its potential audience after 50 years, but those in running circles who are looking for the full story will enjoy this thoroughly.

Four stars

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Review: Legends and Soles (2025)

By Sonny Vaccaro with Armen Keteyian

The cover of "Legends and Soles" raises an unusual question by the standards of autobiography. Who exactly is this "Sonny Vaccaro," the author of the book? 

That's not exactly an easy question to answer. Sonny was one of the great characters of the basketball world for decades, filling a variety of roles. He'd pop up in references to the game off the court, where he was quite influential in a number of ways. It takes a book to sort of answer the question of his identity, and this is that book.

Vaccaro grew up in the Pittsburgh area, and became something of a hustler in the sports world. That is to say, he put together a high school all-star basketball game that often attracted some of the best players in the country to participate. Vaccaro also used his "recruiting" talents for a basketball camp, in which top players squared off against each other while the nation's best coaches enjoyed the chance for "one-stop shopping" when it came to scouting and recruiting. 

After a while, Vaccaro knew everyone in the college basketball business. When Nike was just starting up and wanted to get into the apparel and shoe business for something other than track, Vaccaro became something of a representative for the company. Sonny seems to have gotten the idea that the way to start was to pay the coaches a fee and have them hand out free gear to the players. The coaches, who were relatively unpaid at the time, jumped at the chance. It was revolutionary. Nike got off to such a good start that it became the preeminent outfitter of college basketball teams in the country - much to the disappointment of the more established businesses in that area. Just Do It, indeed.

That eventually led to the biggest moment in Vaccaro's professional life. In 1984, Nike wanted to move into the area of player endorsements in a big way. The usual technique was to sign several players and hope one of them would break into the public eye. Vaccaro says he was the one that suggested the company go all in on one player, giving him the year's entire marketing budget. But it had to be a special player, and Vaccaro thought Michael Jordan was that player. He'd bet his job on it, he said.

Yeah, that worked out pretty well. There's a great story about how agent David Falk changed the terms of the deal with Nike in order to take more money in direct payments and less from royalties from a unique called "Air Jordan." Oops. That little contract change cost his client millions - not that Jordan was ever hurting from a financial  standpoint. The whole story received the Hollywood treatment in the movie "Air," which is quite watchable considering it's not exactly an action thriller.

Vaccaro and Nike eventually went their separate ways - in other words, Sonny was fired. He landed with another athletic goods company, Adidas, which was mostly connected with European soccer but had little presence over here. Vaccaro spent his time looking for the next big thing, and found one of them when he was still a ways from high school graduation. Kobe Bryant eventually signed with Adidas. Another star did get away, though, when LeBron James received a lower-than-expected offer from Vaccaro's bosses with Adidas in Germany and went to Nike. The two sides split up after that. 

Vaccaro did a little more marketing work, and then opted to spend his time working on a class action lawsuit against the NCAA. Ed O'Bannon was the lead plaintiff in the suit. It took a while, but O'Bannon and Company won. That opened the door to direct payments to college players, which has led to a massive change in college sports which is still sorting itself out years later. 

There is plenty of name-dropping here, as you might expect. A couple of generations of top players took part in Vaccaro's game. Sonny also made plenty of friends among the coaching fraternity, which you'd expect when you deliver money from almost nowhere. There also is some serious score-settling along the way, with Nike founder Phil Knight and basketball coach George Raveling (who was the best man at Vaccaro's second wedding before things between the two men fell apart). It's a little ugly to read this from someone who seems to have hugged every basketball name he's ever met, but it's part of the story - and it's his book.

People such as Vaccaro seem to work in the shadows a bit (that often happened to people who liked their gambling back then), and sometimes the truth can be a little cloudy. It is worth noting that Sonny's co-author is Armen Keteyian, who has an excellent reputation as a reporter. If Keteyian is involved, it seems more likely that the story is pretty close to the straight scoop.

Think of "Legends and Soles" this way: it definitely would be worthwhile to spend some time with Sonny over dinner, hearing his stories. As for those who couldn't figure out how to do that (including me), this is a good substitute. The audience for the book might be small, but it will entertain those who pick it up and zip through it.

Three stars

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Review: The Stith Brothers (2024)

By Sam Stith

A few things become immediately obvious after the first glance at this book. 

It's small. While it checks in at 145 listed pages, the actual type essentially ends at page 75. That's not much bang for the buck, even for those reading the paperback edition instead of the hard-cover version. Along those lines, it's about the only book I've seen where the odd-numbered pages are on the left side. 

It's about the only autobiography you'll ever read that is written in the third person. There are no quotes anywhere. Some of the type that goes with the photos in the back half require a microscope instead of reading glasses. 

As you might have guessed already, this is self-published - so some of this is understandable. The standards are a little different. 

More importantly, it's a little sad. Author Sam Stith has a good story to tell here, as he and his brother Tom turned out to be pioneers in a sense, that's not fully told. 

The Stith family grew up relatively poor in Emporia, North Carolina. Sam and Tom (born 18 months apart) had strike one thrown at them when they were infants when their father died. While the cause of death of listed as drowning, let's just say there's a good chance that a cause of the death in the early 1940s in the South might not be accidental. Sam's mother and grandmother did the best they could raising four children (there were two older girls in the family).

Eventually, the mother decided that the Old South was no place for a single parent, and everyone headed to New York City. There the brothers found time to pick up basketball, and discovered they were good at it. By junior high they were good enough to attract some attention, which helped them receive a scholarship at a private high school in Brooklyn. They integrated the school's basketball team in the process, and were all-New York City selections. Along the way, the mother and grandmother also died. The kids somehow banded together to get through each day. 

Sam and Tom were standouts at St. Francis Prep, and they both appreciated the help of the Franciscan order. When it came time to pick a college, they decided to pick another school run by the Franciscans. It was an odd choice in a sense. St. Bonaventure, in relatively tiny Olean south of Buffalo, was about as different a place from New York City as could be imagined. But the small school had a basketball tradition - although it was an all-white one at the time - and they signed up.

It worked out well. Tom Stith was a two-time consensus All-American for Bona, and brother Sam was quite good too. It was one of the great basketball eras in school history. Whenever the history of St. Bonaventure basketball comes up, Tom and Sam are mentioned. 

The brothers' basketball connections came to a rather abrupt end. Tom was the second overall pick by the New York Knicks in 1961, but came down with tuberculosis shortly after starting his career. Oddly, he never got much of a chance to play after recovering, even though Eddie Donovan, his college coach, had moved on to the same job with the Knicks. Sam was a late-round draft choice by Cincinnati in 1960, eventually floated to the Knicks for a brief time, and joined Tom in a minor league. Donovan acted in an enigmatic way toward Sam, just like he did toward Tom. He rarely even talked to them after they were done with Bona basketball. Sam still is looking for an explanation.     

Sam and Tom moved on from basketball, and both seemed to have good lives with happy families and good jobs. Tom died in 2010, but Sam is still around - with his own YouTube channel, of all things. 

That's the first half of the book in a nutshell. The rest of the publication has some photos and clippings, and some carry captions. But the pictures are really small in many cases, with unused white space surrounding them, and accompanying words have some serious typos. 

As you could guess at this point, there's a good story of persistence and triumph to be told here. "The Stith Brothers" doesn't really tell it fully. A good short biography written by a professional is in order here. Buying the book is merely a nice gesture toward a pioneer of the game who deserves better. 

Two stars

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Review: The American Game (2025)

By S.L. Price

I was first introduced to the game of indoor lacrosse in 2008, when I was assigned to cover the Buffalo Bandits for my newspaper. I had seen some games over the years, but I can't say I knew much about the sport and its history. I didn't even know that Canada played box lacrosse (same game, different name) over the summer. It seems that arena operators needed something to keep their buildings busy over the summer when hockey was out of session, and lacrosse was one of their solutions.

What I obviously needed at the time was a book that covered the history of the sport, with all of its particularities and quirks. "The American Game" now has come along to fill that gap - a little late for my purposes, but not for others. 

The book by S.L. Price is something of a big sandwich with many ingredients, with the world lacrosse championships (if you hear or read lacrosse by itself without a qualifier, the reference is usually to the outdoor game) in 2018 and 2023 serving as the start and finish. They become the launching point for discussion about this sport's history. More than any other recreational activity, lacrosse has an extremely complicated history and evolution. 

Is it our oldest game? Well, it's in the neighborhood. The Native population has been playing a form of it since the 12th century. That baseball and football newcomers in the neighborhood. The origin game had a spiritual aspect to it, and involved hundreds of people playing over vast stretches of land. Not only did it offer some pleasure, but it helped train people for warfare. French missionaries arrived in the 1600s and named the game lacrosse because of the shape of the sticks - which were always wooden and thus connected the player to nature. Organized versions of the game began with a club in Montreal in 1856. Once that happened, it was easier to make the game "portable" and demonstrate it to others. 

A funny thing happened along the way in terms of the game's popularity. It caught on at elite colleges in the Northeast part of the United States first. The Ivy League was partly responsible for that, but other top universities in that region were involved as well. So we had the odd combination of the sport being played by relatively uneducated Natives (discrimination and obstacles have been part of their lives throughout our history) and rich white young males. That's created a tension that exists to this day. The sport has done well in the Baltimore area and Long Island; it's interesting that the indoor game as a viable commercial entity has failed in both places over the years.

There are all sorts of issues that have come up over the years as lacrosse officials have tried to grow the game throughout the continent and the world, and Price gives them a long look. The Native population is very proud about its role in inventing the game, but has had to battle to earn respect for that fact for many years. In recent years, the aboriginal population has tried to field a "national" team made up of people on both sides of the United States-Canada border. That's very different than any other model for the creation of a team, and it keeps hitting road blocks. For example, the Haudenosaunee team (it went back to its original name from the adopted Iroquois) has tried to use its own passports to attend international events, which proved difficult in some cases. You'll be hearing a great deal about that as we close in on the 2028 Olympics, which will host lacrosse once again.

Growth of the game shouldn't be restricted to white males, of course. African-Americans have been on the fringes of the sport for years. That's in spite of the fact that Jim Brown - still considered one of the greatest lacrosse players ever even though he's better known for football - was a heck of a role model in his play. Imagine taking one of the greatest physical specimens in sports history, putting him a contact sport, and giving him a stick. As the author points out, Brown was also ambidextrous in his shooting, so it's really tough to believe anyone could even slow him down on the field. But Blacks have been a small minority, and sensitivity is not a word traditionally associated with lacrosse players. 

Then there's the matter of women, who are trying to find their way into the sport in increasing numbers. Even various tribes are split on that issue, as it goes against some ancient teachings. It really took Title IX to jump-start lacrosse in this country, and it has made some progress. We'll have to see how far it can move forward to becoming nationally popular, but there are already signs that its growth might represent a change of direction for attitudes within and outside of the sport.

The lacrosse culture also comes up here as well. Two famous incidents are covered here: the murder by a University of Virginia player of his ex-girlfriend, and a rape charge involving the Duke team that was later shown to be false. Surveys of college athletes in recent years have shown very high use of drugs and alcohol by participants. Officials have tried to change that, and the numbers are down a little. But that's allowed lacrosse to drop just below hockey around the top of the lists, rather than having a clear lead. 

On a personal level, I was a little disappointed that indoor lacrosse wasn't covered better along the way. My bias as a Buffalo-based writer comes through, since the Bandits of the NLL average around 18,000 per game. But some top players do play inside and outside. The Thompson family, which grew up near Syracuse, gets plenty of attention here. They have been around the NLL for years, and two of the brothers wore Buffalo Bandits uniforms. Other players with connections to Buffalo pop up here, including Tehoka Nanticoke, Josh Byrne, Dhane Smith and Brett Bucktooth. 

Price obviously put in many, many hours to write "The American Game." He talked to a great many people and learned about others, and it's certainly a comprehensive cultural history of the sport. That was the goal, I assume, and it was a success. The thought did come to mind than there's almost too much of a good thing here, as it checks in at 560 pages (although more than 100 of those are notes and sources). The story line jumps around a little bit along the way. Maybe a little more editing was in order, and obviously this big of a book on lacrosse isn't exactly designed for a mass audience. However, those with an interest in the subject will find the book well-done and comprehensive.

Four stars

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Review: Baseball Prospectus 2025

Edited by Patrick Dubuque, Bryan Grosnick and Ginny Searle. 

Baseball Prospectus 2025 starts out in an interesting way as it launches a 30th edition. The original founders of the book got together to tell the book's origin story. It explains that after the strike of 1994-95, there seemed to be a hole in the niche of books on baseball statistical analysis. Bill James had moved on to other things from his annual Baseball Abstract, and the Elias annuals had just ended in 1994. So a few guys got together and essentially started to put some ideas down on the paper. 

The result was the Baseball Prospectus 1996, with all of 250 copies printed. I suppose one pops up on eBay every so often, but you probably couldn't afford to buy one now. Yes, it was amateurish in some ways - someone forgot to include the chapter on the St. Louis Cardinals. But there is a quote in that first book that set the tone for the 29 volumes that came next: "Since we like to laugh as much as you do, we've tried to be entertaining as well as informative, but if you think we're just one or the other, we'll take it." James' secret weapon in his Abstracts was that he was such a good writer - and didn't take any prisoners because he didn't need day-to-day access to baseball people because he wasn't a journalist covering the sport. That approach has been a hallmark of Baseball Prospectus over the years - it was often quite funny. 

The book is now the biggest part of something of a baseball empire, including a website and some other publications. But this is clearly the flagship of the enterprise. It plops on the doorstep around the start of spring training, promising plenty of insights within lots and lots of pages.

Where are we in year 30? It's striking just how much more information is out there these days, and a lot of it pops along the way. Someone seems to be counting everything that happens in a baseball game, from what pitch is thrown to how fast it is to where it arrives around home plate to how hard it is hit to where it lands. And there are a lot of games, so that's a lot of data that is kept somewhere. Baseball Prospectus has a lot of smart guys looking at the data as they search for connections and conclusions.

The publication adds some new tools this year in the form of metrics like StuffPro and PitchPro. I'm not going to tell you I read much of it, or that I even understood it. But it's nice to know the brainy types are still poking around in all sorts of different areas. 

In going through this book, it seems as if the player descriptions often lean heavily on the site of data analysis and new statistics to come to conclusions. I found myself a little lost with some of the numbers, and that's speaking as someone who called himself a one-man analytics staff with his slow-pitch softball team in the 1980s and 1990s. (I'm confident we were the only team in the Malone's bar league to keep track of Runs Created.) 

In other words, the book is still informative, but perhaps not quite as entertaining as it used to be. That varies from team to team and writer to writer, but to be fair it's difficult to be funny in print. Maybe I skim the player summaries a little more than I used to do in the old days. On the other hand, the team essays usually offer some original thoughts and different perspectives, and they remain smart and fun. Some other articles on baseball are worthwhile as well.

This book usually finds its biggest audience with fantasy players, which is fine. I'm probably not as enthusiastic about the book as those in that particular group, but I still buy it every year and look forward to its arrival. "Baseball Prospectus 2025" will be in a convenient place for the rest of the baseball season, coming out of there's a trade of interest or if I just want background information when a game pops up on television. There's something comforting about that.

Four stars

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Review: Losing Big (2025)

By Jonathan Cohen

The discussion about sports gambling since it has been legalized a few years ago certainly sounds familiar to many.

Do you remember how we heard about how state lotteries were going to provide valuable dollars for our educational system? Do you recall that Off-Track Betting in horse racing would tap in on money already being spent illegally and end up going to the greater good?

Those two areas have become a permanent part of our lives, of course. The problem is that they have come with a cost. Making it easier to gamble certainly has meant more people are gambling, and that led to more social costs affecting society as a whole. A percentage of gamblers - maybe not a big number, but some - are going to become addicted, and will ruin their own lives and the lives of others. You're probably heard stories about lower-class people whose retirement plan is to buy lottery tickets, where the odds definitely aren't in your favor. And gambling taxes are regressive in nature; they draw more money from the lower brackets than the upper.

The 2018 Supreme Court decision to allow wagering on sports events certainly has broadened the scope of gambling in our society. After all, many fans consider themselves experts on the subject of sports, and figure waging on outcomes should be easy. About one in five adults wagered on such fun games in 2023, and it's tough to go anywhere in the world of sports these days (in-person, television, etc.) without being bombarded with marketing messages from such companies as FanDuel and Draft Kings. 

It's a good time, then, to take a look at what's going on right now. Jonathan Cohen has done just that in "Losing Big."

Cohen is well qualified for the job. He's written acclaimed books on lotteries and gambling. Here he takes a look at the small picture and the big picture, as both are important in telling the story in a sense. We learn about how states slowly embraced the concept of sports gambling in order to increase revenues - even though it's actually a regressive tax on the population, since the money paid into the system is skewed by the lower classes contributing a higher rate than the rest of the population. There are other costs as well, such as a high rate of suicides among problem gamblers.

There are stories here about how the gambling companies played a large part in drawing up the rules for such activities through lobbying. The NFL's attitude gets an examination; it's interesting how the league (and other sports leagues) were strongly anti-gambling before they became part of "the house" and thus profited from it all. One gambler offers something of a case study on what can go wrong here. There's also a chapter on how other countries are dealing with the excesses created by sports gambling. 

Some of the stories along the way are quite interesting. Anyone who has been paying attention has seen how the sportsbooks are offering "refunds" to first-time gamblers if they lost that initial wagers. The benefits were so great, Cohen discovered, that the companies didn't have any profits to share with the states. Hmm. But in the long term, they lured some people in for keeps.   

Cohen also has some idea on how to make the system work better. His list starts with the sportsbooks taking steps to protect the individual players from ruin. He calls for some national standards for the industry. a crackdown on illegal and foreign sports books, and more independent regulation and education programs.

I realize that when it comes to a discussion about the morality of gambling, the train has left the station. Everyone does it, and they are going to keep doing it. The Puritans lost that argument. But I don't particularly like what gambling has done to the games. It certainly feels like the level of cynicism among fans has increased, particularly among officiating. The use of "point spreads" in certain sports means that some people will be watching a game with a different approach than the usual main concept of winning and losing. In other words, my team needs to win by four points to make me happy, and not by one. 

That doesn't include the obvious elephant in the room. There are going to be more and more fixed outcomes and scandals down the road. The pros at least are making enough money in many cases so that it would be hard to tempt them financially. But these days you can bet on such sports as college lacrosse, where temptation might land on more favorable ears. 

Cohen's book is a little dry in spots (it's hard not to be considering some of the material), but it makes its points nicely and quickly. Think of "Losing Big," then, as an introduction to a serious subject that's not going away in the near future. It's going to be a bumpy ride. 

Four stars

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Review: Giannis (2021)

By Mirin Fader

There's one usual rule when it comes to autobiographies and biographies of famous athletes: Don't write them until their athletic career is over. 

That's because a period of time in sports usually has enough drama to carry the story through to the ending. It feels a little incomplete without a "how did it turn out?" section. Besides, the subject often isn't old enough to put things into perspective.

Now ... when it comes to the book "Giannis," take that rule, and deposit it in the nearest wastebasket. 

That's because the story of Giannis Antetokounmpo - I'm still working on how to say and type that smoothly - had enough drama in it by the age of 26 to more than fill a book. That's why it still fascinates. 

Full credit to Mirin Fader for coming up with the complete version of the story. She seems to have talked to everyone involved, and supplemented it with other research. Fader came up with a book in 2021 that was simply jammed with great information and insights. 

If you don't know much about the origin story of the Milwaukee Bucks' standout, he was born in Greece to Nigerian parents. The family all had to do almost anything possible to scrape up enough money to have some place to sleep and something to eat on a daily basis. The kids, all three boys (another one was back in Nigeria), didn't even have Greek citizenship papers even though they were born there. Oh, and Giannis and family were black, and there were plenty of people in Greece who needed to take a look at one of them and decide they hated them. 

Giannis did figure out a way to play some basketball after an early fling with soccer didn't work out. It was a good idea, since he was getting taller by the moment in his youth. The problem was that there wasn't enough food at times, so that "lean and hungry" look was sort of permanent. Giannis needed time to grow into his body, and it's a little difficult to believe that he had a chance to become the proverbial prospect. Antetokoumpo couldn't even play with some national teams, because he didn't have citizenship papers. 

But he blossomed at just the right time. When the NBA Draft came along in 2013, some NBA teams thought he might someday turn into a player. The odds were a bit long. However, the Milwaukee Bucks hadn't been a strong contender since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left town. There was talk that the team might have to move if it didn't make a strong move up in the standings. The Bucks took a chance and drafted him 15th in the first round, surprising almost everyone. 

It's a "stranger in a strange land" story from there. Giannis moved to Milwaukee, which in hindsight was a great place for him. New York or Los Angeles might have been overwhelmed. Milwaukee was a little cold and small, but it was a good place for someone with such an unusual background to learn the American ways. Antetokounmpo also worked hard, and then worked harder. After some serious negotiating, his whole family came across the pond from Greece to help him out. He became better, with each passing year, and fit in nicely with the style of basketball in vogue today in which all players- even 7-footers - have to be comfortable at any place on the court.

Giannis eventually started making NBA All-Star Games and winning individual awards. His career seemed to reach a climax in 2019, when he was named the league's Most Valuable Player. But then he did it again in 2020. That's where the book's story ends, but you don't need a spoiler alert to know that the best was yet to come. In 2021, the Bucks won their first NBA championship in 50 years, and Antetokounmpo was their leader. It was a heck of way to launch into a new contract that paid him a huge amount of money and in theory would keep him in Milwaukee for several more years. (It's easy to wonder if Fader watched that title and thought to herself, "Couldn't they have done it last year?")

Yes, this is a sports book, but as usual the best sports books don't easily fall into that stifling category. "Friday Nights Lights" was about high school football, and a ton of other things too. You can come up with several more examples. The details about those days in Greece are amazing to read, and the stories from Giannis' NBA days also are quite candid and interesting. 

"Giannis" probably works best for those who have little idea of Antetokounmpo's personal story, but practically everyone ought to learn a lot about this fascinating individual. Makes me wish I had read it sooner, but it's still very, very worthwhile.

Five stars

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Review: Selling Baseball (2025)

By Jeffrey Orens

There was a certain symmetry in the timing of when baseball started to take its present form as a business enterprise. The American League started operations in 1901, right at the beginning of the 20th century. It joined the established National League (founded in 1876) at that point, and eventually came together under one business umbrella - although it took longer than you might think to make it a full integration.

We tend to ignore what happened in the 19th century on some level, partly out of convenience. We're used to having the two leagues in business, and it's easy to head back to when that model began. But obviously, the game, the sport and the business needed time to develop. It's been up to some baseball historians to come up with a variety of books and articles to answer the age-old question, "How did we get here?"

In this case, author Jeffrey Orens has focused in on a couple of the major figures of 19th century base ball (as it was called in the day): George Wright and Al Spalding. Both are in the Baseball Hall of Fame. The reason that these two men were picked for biographies of sort in "Selling Baseball" only has some connection to their abilities on the field, which were admittedly considerable. They also had quite an influence on the game off the field - in essence, baseball's first marketing success stories. 

Wright was one of the best players of the 19th century. He was the star of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional team in the sport. When the National Association was formed in 1871 - the first true pro baseball league as we know it - Wright landed in Boston and helped establish a dynasty there. He was accompanied in both spots by older brother Harry, who served as the player/manager of the teams. 

But soon after his arrival in Boston, the light bulb in George Wright's brain went off. If baseball was such a great game, more people should be playing it. They would need equipment to do so, and such items as baseballs, bats, gloves, safety equipment, etc. were becoming standardized. Why not get in on the financial ground floor in the 1870s? Which he did.

Spalding was a teammate of George Wright in Boston in the first half of the 1870s. He moved to Chicago in 1876, played three years there and then retired. Al finished with a career record of 252-65, numbers that were helped by leading his league in pitching wins for six straight years. In 1877, Spalding starting wearing a glove as his appearances on the field started to diminish. Gloves were unusual at that point - you probably could pick out a baseball player by his mangled hands at this point in history - but he liked the concept and convinced some others to use one. And once gloves became universal, the game changed for good and for the better. 

Upon his return to his native Chicago area, Spalding had the same idea as Wright. Why not start a sporting goods business? The idea worked well in the Midwest too. Soon Al had a chain of stores, and started working on other elements of the business. For example, he helped produce an annual guide for baseball that became the top reference source in the country on such matters. 

Orens makes it clear that Wright is more of a good guy in the story. Spalding wasn't above exaggerating or even lying about matters. The best example was when baseball formed a commission on how to figure out how baseball was created. Even though it clearly evolved from other games that came over from Europe, Spalding helped ram through a conclusion on very shaky evidence that Abner Doubleday invented baseball in Cooperstown, New York - even though Doubleday was elsewhere at the time. 

Orens' book has some interesting information between its covers. In hindsight, the concept of a professional sport developed quite quickly. It was something of a regional specialty when the Civil War helped spread it to new areas around the country. Once teams started forming, it was almost inevitable that one city would play a team from its neighbor. It was also inevitable that eligibility and financial rules would get bent along the way ... in other words, teams would figure out a way to lure the best players with under-the-table cash. The cure for that was professionalism. 

The last few chapters aren't quite as gripping. Spalding led an around-the-world tour one offseason in an effort to promote the game. There is a book out there written about that entire experience. But it's still difficult to make a series of exhibition games from long ago dramatic. We hear about Wright's involvement in the eventual growth of golf and lawn tennis as well as something called roller polo (as Orens writes, it's indoor hockey on roller skates). George sold some merchandise in the latter even if the game's 19th-century popularity was short-lived. Some loose ends are tied together in the final main chapter, including the players' attempt at starting their own league in 1890 in order to make negotiations with owners much less one-sided. Spoiler alert: It didn't work. 

"Selling Baseball" accomplishes its goal of illuminating the story about how Wright and Spalding leveraged their on-field success to earn themselves some money and promote baseball and other sports in the process, and does it quickly and professionally. It's hard to say if such a book will find a good-sized audience, but it's nice to have such a publication out there for those interested in the subject.

Three stars

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