The Best Sports Books Ever Written
Sports books are a strange genre: half reporting, half confession, and nobody agrees on the good ones. Vote them into an order you can defend. Two sources decide which group a book belongs to, and neither one supplies a position. A book is in the named group if it appears on Sports Illustrated's Top 100 Sports Books of All Time, published in the issue of December 16, 2002, or if it won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, awarded annually from 1989 through 2025. Everything else forms the second group. Be honest about the ceiling on the first of those sources: a magazine roster closed in December 2002 cannot reach a book published after it, so a recent title joins the named group only by winning the prize. Twenty-five of the thirty candidates that got this far qualify for that group, so plenty of qualifying books are absent. Others are absent for a duller reason: no usable record in the catalogue this list links to. Disagree with the grouping and the sequence, and vote.
Buzz Bissinger — Friday Night Lights (1990) is #1 on “The Best Sports Books Ever Written”.
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Buzz Bissinger — Friday Night Lights (1990)
Odessa, Texas, 1988: the author moved his family there for a year and followed Permian High School through a season that the town treated as its economic and racial argument with itself. The reporting made him unwelcome in Odessa for a long time. Sports Illustrated picked a hundred sports books in December 2002 and this came in at 4.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2645895W - 2
Jim Bouton — Ball Four (1970)
Kept as a diary through the 1969 season, mostly with the expansion Seattle Pilots, while its author tried to save his career with a knuckleball. Bowie Kuhn called it "detrimental to baseball" and pressed Bouton to sign a statement calling the book fiction. He refused. Third when Sports Illustrated counted out its hundred in December 2002.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3961899W - 3
Ken Dryden — The Game (1983)
Written by the goaltender himself, which normally means a ghostwriter and a trophy count, and here means neither. Structured around eight days late in the 1978-79 Montreal Canadiens season, it is mostly about how a job you are good at stops being enjoyable. Ninth among the hundred Sports Illustrated chose in 2002. He had stopped playing four years before it appeared.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2406616W - 4
William Finnegan — Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015)
Two decades of chasing waves across the Pacific, including the months in 1978 spent finding Tavarua in Fiji and then keeping quiet about it. Published in 2015, it won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year for 2016, which is its whole claim to the named group: the older source had shut in 2002, thirteen years before this existed.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20020207W - 5
Eduardo Galeano — Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1995)
Hundreds of short chapters, some barely a paragraph, moving from the 1930 World Cup forward, with the money and the television deals treated as part of the story rather than a footnote to it. Galeano wrote it in Spanish in 1995; Mark Fried's English translation followed. It shows up at 79 on the American hundred Sports Illustrated printed in 2002, which says more about that magazine's reach than about the writing.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL264352W - 6
David Halberstam — The Breaks of the Game (1981)
Portland won a championship in 1977 and by the 1979-80 season the whole thing had come apart, which is the year Halberstam spent with the Trail Blazers. Money, race, television and Bill Walton's feet, reported the way he reported Washington. Its credential is a place on Sports Illustrated's 2002 hundred, at 17.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL109587W - 7
Laura Hillenbrand — Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001)
Four damaged parties, counting the horse: a half-blind jockey, a silent trainer, an owner who had lost a son, and a colt too small and too lazy to look like anything. The 1938 match race against War Admiral at Pimlico is the set piece. Two things get it in: number 12 for Sports Illustrated in 2002, and the William Hill prize for 2001.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5963500W - 8
Nick Hornby — Fever Pitch (1992)
Arsenal, from 1968 onward, told as a sequence of matches rather than a sequence of years. The trick is that the book is honest about fandom being closer to a compulsion than a hobby, and it does not ask you to admire that. It qualifies twice over: 10 on the 2002 Sports Illustrated hundred, plus the William Hill award for 1992.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1916902W - 9
C. L. R. James — Beyond a Boundary (1963)
"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" That line is James's, and the book behind it is part memoir, part history of colonial Trinidad, part argument about W. G. Grace and Victorian England. Sports Illustrated listed it at 36 in December 2002, which is a membership fact and not a measurement of anything.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1156005W - 10
Roger Kahn — The Boys of Summer (1972)
Two books in one. First a beat writer's Brooklyn childhood and the Dodgers of the early 1950s, then the harder half: he goes and finds those men twenty years on, in car dealerships and sickbeds and a Pennsylvania mining town. Sports Illustrated had it second in December 2002, for whatever a magazine's ordinal is worth. The second half is why the book lasts.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15128791W - 11
Jon Krakauer — Into Thin Air (1997)
Everest, May 1996: a magazine assignment turned into eight deaths on the mountain, and the reporter was on the rope. Published in 1997, it is a first-hand account written by a participant who keeps interrogating his own memory of what he saw and when. It placed 48th when Sports Illustrated assembled its hundred in 2002. Other survivors have disputed parts of it, loudly.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1974548W - 12
A. J. Liebling — The Sweet Science (1956)
Collected from New Yorker pieces written between 1951 and 1955, this is boxing as an apprenticeship: Liebling traces his own line back through Jack O'Brien to Bob Fitzsimmons, and Archie Moore turns up throughout. Sports Illustrated gave this one the number 1 in its issue of December 16, 2002. Funny before it is grand.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL464654W - 13
John McPhee — Levels of the Game (1969)
One tennis match, point by point: Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner in the 1968 US Open semi-final at Forest Hills. Each rally opens onto where the two men came from, which is really an argument about class and race in America disguised as a scorecard. Number 16 on the list Sports Illustrated ran in 2002. Under 150 pages.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7986802W - 14
Daniel James Brown — The Boys in the Boat (2013)
Nine sons of loggers and shipyard workers from the University of Washington, rowing in front of Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, out in the worst lane with a sick stroke. Published in 2013, it carries neither a Sports Illustrated ordinal nor a William Hill year, which places it in the second group. Joe Rantz's own life is what holds the book together.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17038299W - 15
Michael Lewis — Moneyball (2003)
Published in 2003, which is the problem: Sports Illustrated's hundred had closed the December before, months ahead of this, and no William Hill year has ever come its way. Second group, then. The Oakland draft room, on-base percentage as an undervalued asset, and a front office argument that spread well past baseball.
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL7944813W
How this list was ranked
Readers rank this list by voting items up and down. Items are ordered by reader votes.
