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•   The best sports books and autobiographies

The best sports books and autobiographies

From gritty sports autobiographies by olympic athletes and a multiple ballon d’or winner to explorations of marathon running and the cultural impact of football, here is a trophy cabinet of some of the best sports books jostling for position on the shelves..

Determined, competitive and possessing an impressive capacity for mental endurance – the characteristics that make great athletes often lead them to live extraordinary lives. Sports autobiographies offer us the opportunity to get the full story behind the goals, records and medals, as well as help us understand the wider impact of the athletic world off the field.

Whether your favourite sport requires a ball, an engine or even a hoof, here is a compilation of the best sports books and autobiographies out there.

• Running & athletics
• Other sports

The best football books

By chris kamara.

One of the most well-known faces of the beautiful game, Chris ‘Kammy’ Kamara is a national treasure. Now, he’s sharing the story of his incredible life. From his days in the Royal Navy and a playing career that took him all over England to becoming one of the game’s best-loved commentators, Kammy lifts the lid on a career that he could never have dreamt of growing up in Middlesbrough. Told with unflinching honesty, but with his trademark humour and positivity, this is a must-read for any football fan.

The World's Biggest Cash Machine

By chris blackhurst.

In The World's Biggest Cash Machine , Chris Blackhurst meticulously unravels the controversial reign of the Glazers over Manchester United. Purchasing the club in 2005, they ignited global discontent, driving it into record debts and marking the fiscal transformation of football. Despite on-field declines, they flourished financially. Blackhurst probes their secretive lives and business acumen, while mapping the club’s captivating journey amidst the Premier League’s metamorphosis into a billionaires' haven.

On Days Like These

By martin o'neill.

With a career spanning over fifty years, Martin tells of his exhilarating highs and painful lows; from the joys of winning trophies, promotion and fighting for World Cups to being harangued by fans, boardroom drama, relegation scraps and being fired. Written with his trademark honesty and humour,  On Days Like These  is one of the most insightful and captivating sports autobiographies and a must-read for any fans of the beautiful game.

Cheers, Geoff!

By geoff shreeves.

Packed full of hilarious stories on and off the pitch – including trying to teach Sir Michael Caine how to act, a frightening encounter with Mike Tyson, as well as getting a lift home from the World Cup with Mick Jagger –  Cheers, Geoff!  is a must-read autobiography for any football fan. A natural storyteller, Geoff brings an astonishing catalogue of tales to life with his unique brand of experience, insight and humour.

The Little Red Book of Klopp

It’s debatable whether Jürgen Klopp is better-known for his charisma off the pitch or his success on it. Having brought Liverpool back to winning ways in both the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League, Klopp is known for captivating press conferences and charming touch-line antics. The Little Red Book of Klopp is a collection of his most iconic sayings, from light-hearted witticisms to cutting insults.

The Age of Football

By david goldblatt.

For many people around the world, football is so much more than just a game. In The Age of Football , sport historian David Goldblatt widens the lens to trace how the game intersects politics, economics and wider culture. With focuses as diverse as prison football in Uganda, the presidency of Recep Erdogan and the importance of the beautiful game in the Arab Spring, David demonstrates the extent to which the sport impacts society today.

My Life in Football

By kevin keegan.

Whether it’s being the only Englishman to win the Ballon d’Or twice, achieving European glory with Liverpool or managing Newcastle from the bottom of the Second Division to the brink of winning the Premier League title, Kevin Keegan – known as ‘King Kev’ – has proven his pedigree both on the pitch and the touchline.  His autobiography details the highs and lows of an illustrious career, including clashes with Sir Alex Ferguson and his return to Newcastle during the controversial Mike Ashley era.

The best rugby books

By rassie erasmus.

Rassie Erasmus, a rugby maverick, unfolds his unconventional journey from player to coach in the pinnacle of the sport. This candid account delves into his pivotal roles in iconic Springbok teams, grappling with injuries, and pioneering coaching methods. Most crucially, Rassie talks about his greatest contribution to South African rugby: appointing its first black captain, Siya Kolisi, without much fanfare or controversy. As his bold plans for effective racial transformation of the national team achieved immediate success, they culminated in glory at the 2019 Rugby World Cup. 

Too Many Reasons to Live

By rob burrow.

The inspirational memoir from rugby league legend Rob Burrow on his extraordinary career and his battle with motor neurone disease.

This is the story of a tiny kid who adored rugby league but never should have made it  –  and ended up in the Leeds hall of fame. It's the story of a man who resolved to turn a terrible predicament into something positive  –  when he could have thrown the towel in. It's about the power of love, between Rob and his childhood sweetheart Lindsey; and of friendship, between Rob and his faithful team mates. Far more than a sports memoir,  Too Many Reasons to Live  is a story of boundless courage and infinite kindness.

‘ He is one in a million and his story is truly inspirational ’ Clare Balding on Rob Burrows

Belonging: The Autobiography

By alun wyn jones.

Belonging  is the story about how as a boy, Alun Wyn Jones left Mumbles and returned as the most capped rugby player of all time. It is the story of what it takes to become a player who is seen by many as one of the greatest Welsh players there has ever been. What it takes to go from sitting, crossed legged on the hall floor at school, watching the 1997 Lions Tour of South Africa to being named the 2021 Lions Captain.

But is it also about  perthyn  - belonging, playing for Wales, what it takes to earn the right to be there, and what it feels like to make the sacrifices along the way. 

‘ Unbelievable player. Magnificent captain. One of the game’s greatest icons. ’ James Haskell on Alun Wyn Jones

by Eddie Jones

One of the most successful sports coaches ever, Eddie Jones took three separate nations to Rugby World Cup Finals, and enjoyed a success rate with the England team of almost eighty per cent. An expert in guiding and managing high-performing teams, Jones believes that his methods can be applied to many walks of life. From fostering ambition to following your curiosity, Jones shares his methodology, much of it learned through conversations with other successful managers and leaders, including Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola. Leadership  is the ultimate guide to being your best, in rugby and in life.

My Life and Rugby

With a career spanning four World Cups, Eddie Jones is one of the most seasoned figures in Rugby Union. Possessing an unparalleled ability to transform teams, he built the Japan national team into the side that defeated South Africa in 2015, and turned a struggling England team into finalists at the 2019 World Cup. The England coach is never afraid to speak his mind, and his autobiography is told true to unflinching form.

The best running & athletics books

The running book, by john connell.

John Connell, award-winning author of The Cow Book, takes the reader on a marathon run of 42.2 kilometres through Ireland. Over 42 chapters and 42,000 words, John reflects on his life, Irish history and the stories of his greatest running heroes. Whether you’re a keen runner or you’d just like to read what it’s like to undertake a marathon, The Running Book is the perfect endorphin-filled sports book about the nature of happiness and how it can be found on foot.

Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams To Winning Olympic Gold

By jessica ennis.

Jessica Ennis-Hill has been one of the poster girls for women in sport for years. Indeed, arguably the greatest moment of the London 2012 games came when Jessica secured her heptathlon gold medal. But her rise was beset with challenges. From being bullied as a child for being small to her career-threatening injury on the eve of the 2008 Olympics, Jessica has had to show plenty of perseverance to prove her doubters wrong. This sports autobiography tells the full story behind the world’s greatest female all-rounder athlete.

The best tennis books

My life: queen of the court, by serena williams.

Serena Williams needs little introduction, having won every major title going in tennis. From growing up playing on courts covered in broken glass in Compton to reaching the top of world tennis, all while being criticised for her unorthodox playing style and dealing with the tragic shooting of her older sister, Serena has proven herself an inspiration to her multitudes of fans. In My Life , she reflects on her extraordinary journey.

The Inner Game of Tennis

Recently named by Bill Gates as one of his 'all-time favourite books', and described by Billie Jean King as her 'tennis bible', this bestseller has been a must-read for tennis players of all abilities for nearly fifty years. Rather than concentrating on how to improve technique, Gallwey deals with the 'inner game' within ourselves as we try to overcome doubt and maintain clarity of mind when playing. 'It’s the best book on tennis that I have ever read,' says Gates, 'and its profound advice applies to many other parts of life.'

‘ Groundbreaking . . . It’s the best book on tennis that I have ever read, and its profound advice applies to many other parts of life. I still give it to friends today. ’ Bill Gates

The best boxing books

When fury takes over, by john fury.

Born into a family of Irish traveller heritage, Big John Fury descends from a long line of bare-knuckle fighters. So it’s no surprise that he too found himself fighting outside the ring at a young age. From his early years in Manchester, John learned to box by practising fighting within the travelling community, before graduating into the sport professionally. The ring has never been far from his sights, and John has played a crucial role in coaching and being a cornerman for his two-time British heavyweight champion son, Tyson Fury. From Netflix's  At Home With The Furys  this is the Gypsy Warrior, Big John Fury, totally unfiltered and in his own words.

Believe: Boxing, Olympics and my life outside the ring

By nicola adams.

Nicola Adams famously changed the face of sport at London 2012 when she became the first woman ever to win an Olympic gold medal for boxing. Repeating her medal haul at Rio 2016 further cemented her place in the nation’s hearts, while she has also gone on to become a champion for  LGBTQ+ rights and a contestant on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. Believe documents the grit and determination that got her to gold.

The best swimming books

By yusra mardini.

While Yusra Mardini was fleeing her native Syria for the Turkish coast in 2015, the small dingy she and many other refugees were on began to sink. Yusra, her sister and two others took to the water, pushing the boat for three and a half hours in open water until they arrived safely at Lesbos. Remarkably, Yusra went on to compete as a swimmer for the Refugee Olympic Athletes Team in the 2016 Rio Olympics, and also became a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. Her autobiography is for anyone who loves true-life stories of outstanding resilience.

In the 1970s, Diana Nyad was widely regarded as the greatest long-distance swimmer in the world but one record continually eluded her: becoming the first woman to swim between Cuba and the Florida Keys. Finally, after four failed attempts and at the age of sixty-four, Diana completed the crossing. This memoir shows her unwavering belief in the face of overwhelming odds. Winner of the Cross Sports International Autobiography of the Year, this is a story of perseverance, tenacity and commitment on an epic scale.

The best books about other sports

Jan ullrich: the best there never was, by daniel friebe.

In 1997, Jan Ullrich obliterated his rivals in the first mountain stage of the Tour de France. So awesome was his display that it sent shockwaves throughout the world of cycling. Everyone agreed: Jan Ullrich was the future of cycling. He was also voted Germany’s most popular sportsperson of all time, and his rivalry with Lance Armstrong defined the most controversial years of the Tour de France. But just what did happen to the best who never was? This is an account of how unbearable expectation, mental and physical fragility, a complicated childhood, a morally corrupt sport and one individual – Lance Armstrong – can conspire to reroute destiny.

by Poorna Bell

Have you ever worried that you're not enough, or that, if you were stronger or more confident you would achieve more? In Stronger , award-winning journalist and competitive amateur powerlifter Poorna Bell investigates and unveils the potential that women can unlock when they realise their strength – both physical, and mental. Through examining her own experiences, as well as those of dozens of women, Bell shows how finding strength can work for you, regardless of your age, ability or background, and offers actionable ways for your to harness it in your life. 

Lights Out, Full Throttle

By damon hill.

Amassing 261 Grand Prix appearances between them, Johnny Herbert and Damon Hill have experienced all the highs, lows and injury records associated with the greatest names in motorsport. In Lights Out, Full Throttle , Johnny and Damon take the reader on a tour around the high-octane world of F1 racing, from Silverstone and safety to Monaco and money, as well as looking at the future of racing in the light of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter.

Alone on the Wall

By alex honnold.

Anyone who has seen the Oscar and BAFTA-winning documentary Free Solo will be familiar with Alex Honnold’s vertigo-inducing work. As one of the world’s best ‘free solo’ climbers, Alex tackles perilous rock faces without the use of any climbing gear. Free soloists undertake one of the deadliest sports on the planet – many have died in pursuit of their sport. Alone on the Wall is a pulse-raising account of some of Alex’s greatest climbs, told with Alex ‘No Big Deal’ Honnold’s trademark calm and collected humour in the face of mortal danger. A sports autobiography for adrenaline junkies.

Dream Horse

By janet vokes.

Janet Vokes dreamed of breeding a working-class horse to take on the wealthy high-flyers. To pursue this idea she bought a mare for £350, bred it with a pedigree stallion and encouraged her Welsh mining village to band together to raise the resulting foal, Dream Alliance. Despite being raised on an allotment, Dream went on to defy the odds at Ascot, Aintree and even Cheltenham Festival. Heart-warming reading for anyone who loves a true underhorse sports book.

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12 Game-Changing Sports Biographies and Memoirs

These winning reads smash the competition.

A great sports story gets everyone on their feet — whether you just finished your 10th marathon or you prefer to race through your TBR stack. The following sports biographies and memoirs are packed with athletic drama that every reader will enjoy, from underdog wins and buzzer-beater finishes to the off-court scandals and triumphant personal comebacks of the greatest athletes of our time.

Magic: The Life of Earvin "Magic" Johnson

By roland lazenby.

From Roland Lazenby, the renowned biographer of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and Jerry West, comes Magic, the definitive sports biography of basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Johnson reached dazzling new heights over the course of his career on the court, transforming American basketball into top-tier entertainment with his exciting playing style and leading the Los Angeles Lakers to greatness during the team’s Showtime era. Yet Johnson also faced his share of scandals and controversies, including his extravagant lifestyle and shock retirement from basketball in the wake of his HIV diagnosis. Lazenby draws on hundreds of interviews with teammates, coaches, rivals, and more to capture every facet of this complex figure, offering a gripping and comprehensive account of the renowned player and his extraordinary career.

By Andre Agassi

A striking story about the double-edged sword of success, Open by Andre Agassi tracks the tennis star’s astounding triumphs, failures, and battles both on and off the court. Agassi went pro at the age of 16; by his early 20s, he was a tennis legend. Yet with worldwide success came pain, doubt, and relentless media scrutiny. Agassi opens up about it all in this candid and bestselling sports memoir, delivering a fascinating read for fans and newcomers alike. And if that isn’t enough to draw you in, note that Open is cowritten by J. R. Moehringer, one of the all-time ghostwriting greats, whose success with this narrative paved the way for his teaming up with Prince Harry on his recent smash memoir . 

Michael Jordan: The Life

Michael Jordan transcends the sports world. You know him even if you know nothing about basketball — and if you grew up in the ’90s, he was practically everywhere you looked. In Michael Jordan: The Life, Roland Lazenby tracks Jordan’s career from college kid to NBA superstar and beyond. Along the way, Lazenby complicates our collective understanding of the sports icon, countering Jordan’s on-court image with the darker sides of his character, his rocky relationships, and his merciless ambition.

By Abby Wambach

In Forward, soccer luminary and two-time Olympic gold medalist Abby Wambach shares her journey from being put on the boys’ soccer team at the age of seven to becoming one of the all-time greatest soccer players in the history of the sport. Wambach’s compelling account is suffused with grit and determination, and it speaks to the unique challenges women face in their quest for athletic greatness. It’s a must-read for sports fans and indeed anyone in need of inspiration. For a double dose of empowerment, check out Wolfpack , Wambach’s #1 New York Times bestseller from 2019 that encourages women to join together and unleash their inner potential.

Path Lit by Lightning

By david maraniss.

Written by David Maraniss, a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the biographer of such figures as Barack Obama and Roberto Clemente, Path Lit by Lightning tells the fascinating story of Jim Thorpe, a renaissance athlete whose rise and fall took on mythic proportions. Thorpe was one of the best all-around athletes the world had ever seen; he won medals in the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, was an All-American football player, and played baseball for the New York Giants. Yet as a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he also faced intense racism and discrimination that hobbled his career and ultimately led to a life of hardship. Maraniss movingly chronicles Thorpe’s life in this landmark sports biography, breaking down the myth to reveal the man at its core.

The Mamba Mentality

By kobe bryant.

Kobe Bryant’s presence on the court was legendary — and it belied a complicated and often troubled life off the court. In The Mamba Mentality, Bryant shares his outlook on life and basketball and delves into his famous “Mamba Mentality” philosophy, an approach to playing that’s built on passion, tenacity, and the singular pursuit of athletic excellence. It’s a fascinating look at the gone-too-soon powerhouse player and his thorny relationship with success, fame, and sports.

By Billie Jean King, Johnette Howard, and Maryanne Vollers

The world of sports would not be the same without Billie Jean King, a legend both in tennis and for her work breaking down barriers for women athletes. All In chronicles King’s career from her formative years through the 1973 Battle of the Sexes exhibition match against Bobby Riggs and the creation of the women’s pro tennis circuit to King’s acknowledgment of her sexual identity and coming out at the age of 51. At once a story of one person’s impact on tennis and a cultural revolution in the sports world, this winning memoir offers insight and guidance on issues from political activism and personal relationships to finding your true self.

Tiger Woods

By jeff benedict and armen keteyian.

In Tiger Woods, sportswriters Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian deliver a fully realized portrait of the eponymous golf titan. The bestselling sports biography draws on interviews with more than 250 people to chronicle Woods’s meteoric rise, scandalous fall, and triumphant return to world-class athletics. The unsparing narrative also shines a light on the damage parents can do in their single-minded quest to turn their children into star athletes, drawing connections between Woods’s unparalleled achievements on the golf course and his parents’ obsession with success. 

The Last Folk Hero

By jeff pearlman.

Bo Jackson was a one-man sports phenomenon in the 1980s and ’90s, excelling in football and baseball, and starring in one of the most successful ad campaigns in Nike history. In addition to his athletic triumphs, wild tales about Jackson leaping over parked cars and helping land a plane in distress elevated the sports star to mythical levels, like a modern-day Paul Bunyan. In The Last Folk Hero, sportswriter Jeff Pearlman tells the story of the man behind the myth. Drawing on more than 700 interviews, this fascinating sports biography is a must-read for Jackson superfans and for those eager to find out more about this larger-than-life American sports icon.

Good for a Girl

By lauren fleshman.

In the bestselling Good for a Girl, elite runner Lauren Fleshman draws on her own story and the work of psychologists and physiologists to advocate for a radical transformation of sports for young women. Competing in institutions that aren’t built for them, women athletes are held back from the beginning and plagued by sexism, eating disorders, and physical and mental injuries. Many would-be elites drop out before they can truly achieve greatness. Fleshman argues that we’re long overdue for a change. Readers will find plenty to love in Fleshman’s rousing narrative, which blends sports memoir with a manifesto and demonstrates a passion for personal success as well as creating a world in which all women athletes are allowed to thrive.

Ali: A Life

By jonathan eig.

Jonathan Eig’s bestselling and award-winning biography of Muhammed Ali turns the facts of Ali’s life and career into a harrowing story of courage, activism, and athletic excellence. The storied heavyweight boxer was not just an accomplished athlete but a natural performer, civil rights activist, and political protester. Drawing on interviews, FBI files, and archival recordings, Eig weaves a gripping tale of Ali’s boxing career, his political victories and personal triumphs, and his lasting impact on American culture.

By Jeff Benedict

We round out our list with a living legend who’s playing at the top of his game. In LeBron, Jeff Benedict chronicles LeBron James’s layered and inspirational story, from his early years of struggle as the son of a young mother to becoming the No.1 overall draft pick in the NBA straight out of high school and his transformation into the greatest basketball player of the 21 st century. Based on three years of research and more than 250 interviews, Benedict’s sweeping narrative goes well beyond James’s success on the court, exploring his relationship to fame and his dual identity as a celebrity and an activist fighting for social justice .

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The Best Sports Memoirs, According to Sports Journalists

Whether you’re a sports fan or just a history buff, looking back at sporting events has produced some of the world’s finest journalism. But it could be argued that no outside observers’ perspective can compare to being inside the heads of those who scored that game-winning point, series-winning run, or tournament-winning goal (or coached any teams that did). Which is why, with so many of our favorite sports still on pause as their leagues figure out how to resume competition, we realized getting lost in a good sports memoir could be the next best thing to spending hours watching a game itself. But with so many sports memoirs ghostwritten or scribbled in a hurry as a valedictory rite of passage, which ones are actually up to snuff?

To find out, we asked 17 experts — including sportswriters, broadcasters, and professors — for their recommendations. While their responses included memoirs written by many athletes who are household names, we also learned about stories told by others that the spotlight may have missed, and a few written by coaches or superfans with perspectives that are just as gripping as those of athletes who actually took the field. Read on for their picks, which we’ve organized by sport. In the tradition of our other reading lists, we’ve named any books with two or more recommendations as best overall. But we’ve also included titles emphatically recommended by just one person, for those who may want to dive further into any category.

Best tennis memoirs

Best overall tennis memoir.

Three people raved about this memoir, which journalist Jonathan Eig, the author of Ali: A Life , says “may be the all-time best-written memoir by a major athlete.” All who recommended it praised the book’s “shockingly” candid nature, pointing out Agassi’s honesty is especially rare for an athlete who was one of the most popular of his generation. “Few autobiographies have dared to show athletes so naked,” writer Sam Diss, the head of content at London-based soccer magazine Mundial , says, adding that Agassi is “not writing this book to stick the boot into old foes or people who screwed him out of money.” Instead, Diss says he’s “passed over, gone clear, and reveals his trauma and grudges with equal parts pain and catharsis, in a way that doesn’t feel point-scoring, but freeing.”

More recommended tennis memoirs

According to Dr. Amira Rose Davis, a Penn State professor of history and African-American studies who also co-hosts the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down , “the long history of black women in sport” is often obscured in sportswriting. But memoirs by black female athletes, which allow them to “narrate their own careers,” can “push us all to consider whose voices we are missing when we tell sports stories.” One of those women is tennis champion Althea Gibson, who wrote two memoirs that Davis recommends. “Gibson broke the color line at Wimbledon and was the first African-American Grand Slam champion,” she tells us. The first, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, chronicles Gibson’s journey from childhood to the majors, while the follow-up, So Much to Live For, chronicles Gibson’s transition from the game to a golf career and beyond. Davis considers both essential reading, but notes that the details of Gibson’s post-career struggles in the latter work are especially poignant, and “serve as a reminder that being the queen of the tennis court is all well is good” but, as Gibson writes, “you can’t eat a crown.”

Editor’s note: These two books are now out of print and therefore priced higher than others on this list.

Another historic player, Arthur Ashe, remains the only black male tennis player to win Wimbledon (among other major titles). Marshall Jon Fisher, author of A Terrible Splendor says Ashe’s memoir has been one of his favorites since he was 12 years old. “Ashe told his life story in the context of a diary of one year on the tennis tour — Wimbledon 1973 to Wimbledon 1974,” Fisher tells us. “If only he’d known he would finally win the hallowed tournament in ’75, he might have waited a year. But then we wouldn’t have the same searching, melancholy masterpiece.”

This 1978 memoir of playing the world tennis circuit in the late 1950s and early 1960s is a “hilarious and poignant gem,” Fisher tells us. “In those days, the tour was more collegial, as well as more attainable for a cast of colorful characters more interested in seeking life experience than in becoming multimillion-dollar ground-stroke machines.” And lucky for readers, Forbes jotted down observations while he toured that “should entertain tennis fans forever,” according to Fisher.

Best baseball memoirs

Best overall baseball memoirs.

Three people told us about pitcher Jim Bouton’s book about his career with the New York Yankees and other teams in the ’60s. According to writer Daniel Okrent (who is credited with inventing the scoring system for fantasy baseball), it is “the memoir that broke the mold, earning Bouton the enmity of his fellow players and the applause of generations of fans” for its honest details of legendary players’ drunkenness, womanizing, and prodigious drug use (including some tales that, Okrent admits, “are less hilarious today”). Mark Kram, Jr., the author most recently of Smokin’ Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier , calls it a “bawdy tell-all” and an “instant sports literary classic.” Bouton was known for his wild knuckleballs, and Eig says that he “tossed the perfect knuckleball with this.”

This memoir by the one-time owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox was recommended to us by both Kram and former Grantland editor Rafe Bartholomew . “Baseball owners were a hidebound and altogether humorless bunch until Bill Veeck crashed the party,” according to Kram, who tells us that, “with a wooden leg, Veeck lugged home from the South Pacific in World War II, sent a dwarf to the plate, gave us the exploding scoreboard, and cooked up countless other promotional stunts that imbued a gray game with jump and color.” Kram says that Veeck’s memoir is “full of colorful tales and big ideas,” adding that he was fortunate enough to spend time with Veeck on a few occasions and that he “emerges in his book just as he was in person. One can almost hear his gravelly chuckle.”

More recommended baseball memoirs

Pitcher Jim Brosnan’s memoir focuses on his time playing for the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds in 1959. Okrent says that the memoir about Brosnan’s “unexceptional season with two unexceptional teams remains the most honest — and, I suspect, most accurate — account of the daily life of a ballplayer that we’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t meant to be a book filled with shocking revelations, according to Okrent, but is now thought of as one thanks to Brosnan’s inclusion of the Cardinals’ trainer “distributing an early form of steroids and amphetamines to the players.”

This bittersweet memoir tells the story of Pat Jordan’s promising, yet unfulfilled career as a pitcher. According to Kram, it’s a “hall-of-fame, lyrical memoir of youth ascendant and the hard luck that spares only the fortunate few.” Jordan began his career as a highly regarded schoolboy pitcher in 1950s Connecticut before, as Kram tells it, “signing with the Milwaukee Braves and spending three years toiling in bush league outposts such as McCook, Davenport, Waycross, Eau Claire and Palatka.” Then, 13 years after the Braves handed him his unconditional release, he revisited that period to write this — and later become “one of our preeminent sports journalists.”

Dirk Hayhurst succeeded where Pat Jordan did not, according to Kram, who notes he actually pitched in the big leagues (albeit briefly). Kram calls this, his second memoir, a “small gem,” noting it unfolds around and during his 2008 season with the San Diego Padres and offers a “candid account of the obstacles that he faced during his climb to the highest league, including conflicts with his eccentric grandmother, alliances and tensions with teammates, and the jitters he overcame when he finally got the call and discovered he was indeed out of his league.”

Best basketball memoirs

Best overall basketball memoirs.

Seven people recommended basketball memoirs, with two directing us to this one by NBA great and former U.S. senator from New Jersey, Bill Bradley. Both Bartholomew and Mike Tollin , an executive producer of ESPN’s The Last Dance , recommend the 240-page book that chronicles just 20 days in the life of Bradley’s time as a professional basketball player. Tollin, who told us he first learned about Bradley’s prowess by reading John McPhee’s famous 1965 profile of Bradley’s college basketball career at Princeton, says that reading the memoir “gave me an even greater appreciation for his humanity, and rare insight.”

“This classic deserves a much wider audience,” Eig tells us (Bartholomew is also a fan, as is Barack Obama, who called it the “best basketball book I’ve ever read.”) At the time he wrote it, Rick Telander was a faded football prospect who spent his time freelance writing and playing pickup basketball games in New York City. The memoir tracks his time observing and playing games at Flatbush’s Foster Park in the mid-1970s, and Telander rotates between observer, player, and team coach, reflecting throughout on the darker reality his fellow players from low-income neighborhoods would return to once the sun went down. “I remember Telander’s beautiful sentences, which feature his keen eye for detail, and his effortless blend of sociology and sport,” Eig says.

More recommended basketball memoirs

New York Times basketball and culture writer Sopan Deb recommends this 1980 memoir by legendary Boston Celtics center Bill Russell (who is regarded as the NBA’s first black superstar). “ Second Wind , in which he famously refers to Boston as a ‘flea market’ of racism, is an honest accounting by one of the most important athletes in the history of mankind,” Deb says.

Editor’s note: Due to this book’s recent popularity and the fact that it hasn’t been reissued (yet), we’re seeing it priced higher than others on this list.

Northwestern University’s director of sports journalism , J.A. Adande (who also appears on ESPN as a contributor), told us this is not only his favorite sports memoir, but that Abdul-Jabbar’s “fascinating perspectives” on race, religion, love, and America itself from the 1950s through the 1980s make it one of his favorite books ever. According to Adande, even though Abdul-Jabbar is one of the greatest players of all time, “basketball feels almost like an afterthought” in this book, or “something he pursued because he was tall and suited for it, but not something he felt as passionately about as, say, jazz.” Adande notes that Abdul-Jabbar has gone on to write dozens of books and essays on timely topics, and that “you can see the genesis of those in Giant Steps .”

Sports journalist and broadcaster Taylor Rooks told us about this memoir written by Tim Grover, a basketball trainer. But she assures he’s not just any trainer: “Tim Grover is the legendary trainer to athletes like Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Dwyane Wade.” The book, according to Rooks, focuses on the mental practices Grover taught these athletes (and others) to ensure they didn’t just have good seasons, but good careers. “It’s full of anecdotes and stories that make you feel closer to the players we all grew up watching,” she says, adding that it includes a favorite quote: “The only difference between feedback and criticism is the way you hear it.”

“My sports life has been consumed by two seminal NBA dynasties: the Michael Jordan Bulls and the Kobe-Shaq-Gasol Lakers,” sports and culture writer Dave Schilling says, adding that “those teams have one thing in common: head coach Phil Jackson.” According to him, anything Jackson wrote would have been a must-read given his shepherding of some of the greatest basketball players of all time, but Eleven Rings , which Schilling describes as memoir–cum–self-help book, goes the extra mile. “It gives an insight into how Jackson motivated his teams, which included a collection of massive egos, some of whom were not prone to taking orders,” he says. “It’s sort of a classic ‘Dad Lit’ book where the author delivers meme-able motivational insights.”

Best football memoirs

Best overall football memoir.

Four folks recommended books about American football, with three specifically highlighting George Plimpton’s memoir of his weeks-long athletic career (Plimpton, of course, is best known for helping to start the Paris Review). Diss describes the book as “the perfect encapsulation of a classic conversation starter: How long could you last in a match at professional level?” Spoiler alert: The answer, Diss points out (without giving the story away), is not long. “But Plimpton’s eloquence and brio propels this dive into American football in a way that’s both very funny and dredges up a newfound respect for even the lowliest pro athlete,” he explains. Okrent is also a fan, telling us “Plimpton’s weeks in uniform in the Detroit Lions’ training camp may have been a stunt, but the book is a gem. However bad Plimpton was as an NFL quarterback, he was that good as a writer — a truly winning combination.”

Another recommended football memoir

According to Rooks, this memoir, written by “one of the more polarizing figures in sports, forces us to ask many questions, especially ‘When does a person who did bad things qualify for the public’s forgiveness?’” Finally Free , Rooks says, tackles Vick’s search for that answer as he goes through his many controversies. “It stuck with me,” she says, “because it speaks to the idea that the bad things that happen to us shape us just as much as the good.”

Best soccer memoirs

Best overall soccer memoir.

While High Fidelity author Nick Hornby spent even less time playing professional sports than George Plimpton (a.k.a. no time at all), Fever Pitch was recommended to us as the ultimate fan’s memoir by three people, two of whom say they weren’t really fans of soccer before picking it up. The book “reads like a letter from a friend,” according to Diss, who describes the plot as “a fan in conversation with himself, in a doomed romance with his club, and asking what it all means to have those men chasing after a ball and those people standing there in the freezing cold and rain watching them do so.” Schilling says Fever Pitch was his entrée into the world of obsessive soccer fandom, telling us the prose “played right into my young-adult-male belief in intellectual and emotional purity. If you are going to love something — Arsenal, the Smiths, comic books, sketch comedy — you better love it to the point that it damages your ability to function in society or hold a job.” Sports journalist Sarah Baicker adds that you “probably don’t even have to care about sports to love the book, but if you do, as I do, you’ll recognize yourself in Hornby’s fandom.”

Another recommended soccer memoir

Wambach’s autobiography came recommended to us by sports reporter and commentator Kate Fagan . According to Fagan, the former star forward of the U.S. women’s national team “isn’t here to build her brand or make you love her, she’s here to be honest about her life, about her drinking, and about the inside workings about the peaks and valleys of being a professional athlete.” For that reason, she says that “if you want to really understand the grind of an athlete — read this.”

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The 30 Best Sports Books of All Time

This list of the best sports books of all time covers a wide variety of sports and perspectives, from boxing to mixed martial arts to basketball and gymnastics and everything in between. The best books about sports capture the experience of athletics, whether you’re simply a die-hard fan, you’re the one up to bat, or you’re a sports journalist. In this roundup of the best nonfiction sports books, you’ve got an angle into athletics from multiple perspectives on a bevy of sports.

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And now for a list of the best sports books of all time…

Barbarian days: a surfing life by william finnegan.

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography, William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days is a gripping memoir about the author’s long-held admiration for surfing. Raised in Hawaii and California, Finnegan developed a fascination with surfing that would last him decades. Now, in Barbarian Days , he shares how chasing waves impacted his life. It’s a surfing book you won’t want to miss and one of the best selling sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase Barbarian Days on Amazon

The boys of summer by roger kahn.

This memoir tells the story of the author’s childhood living within the shadow of Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1930s and 1940s. That team included such baseball greats as Jackie Robinson and Carl Erskine, among others. Later, Roger Kahn covered the 1950s Dodgers for The Herald Tribune . Told with sentimentality and detail that makes this history come alive, The Boys of Summer is one of the best sports books.

How to read it: Purchase The Boys of Summer on Amazon

The boys of winter: the untold story of a coach, a dream, and the 1980 u.s. olympic hockey team by wayne coffey.

This riveting read chronicles the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team that surprised the world in an upset win against the formidable Soviet Union. Known as the “Miracle on Ice,” this epic competition was a resounding defeat against the enemy in the heigh of the Civil War. Thanks to copious insider stories and peppered with details you won’t find anywhere else, The Boys of Winter is an engrossing tale of what became both legend and myth and for sure one of the best books about sports.

How to read it: Purchase The Boys of Winter on Amazon

Doc: the life of roy halladay by todd zolecki.

As a Philadelphia Phillies fan, I know all about pitching phenom Roy Halladay. I even had the good fortune to go to a game where “Doc,” as Halladay was affectionately known, pitched. I’ll never forget how tall and big he was. In this biography of Halladay, MLB.com Phillies journalist Todd Zolecki tells the story of Doc’s ups and downs in his professional career as well as his inner demons that tormented him, including a fight against addiction. Halladay famously died young in a tragic plane accident. Doc keeps his unparalleled career and undeniable legacy alive in what is one of the best sports biographies books.

How to read it: Purchase Doc on Amazon

Fever pitch by nick hornby.

This story behind Fever Pitch will be relatable to anyone who has ever dove headfirst into fandom. But not just fandom during the good times, but during the hard times, the losing seasons, the disappointing losses. In this case, author Nick Hornby is talking about his life’s passion, football (soccer to Americans), though any fan can relate. This is definitely one of best books about sports from a fan’s perspective. This book was adapted to a feature film in 2005.

How to read it: Purchase Fever Pitch on Amazon

Friday night lights by h. g. “buzz” bissinger.

Friday Night Lights is maybe the best football book ever written and definitely one of the best selling sports books. Published in 1990, H. G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s story follows a high school football team in Odessa, Texas. What makes this book so great is the universal core story about the big dreams of small towns that strike through polarized social and racial boundaries and unite fans around a team that puts it all on the line with their game. It’s a book so influential that it inspired the acclaimed TV show, also called Friday Night Lights .

How to read it: Purchase Friday Night Lights on Amazon

The game by ken dryden.

Named one of Sports Illustrated ‘s 10 best sports books of all time, The Game is one to add to your TBR (to-be-read list). This riveting memoir reveals the life and career of Ken Dryden, the former Montreal Canadiens goalie and one-time president of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Dryden details life on and off the ice, giving readers an inside look at what it means to be a professional athlete, what that means for one’s personal life, family, and off-the-rink life, and the way those lines become blurred. This definitely tops any list of the best nonfiction sports books.

How to read it: Purchase The Game on Amazon

The girls of summer: the u.s. women’s soccer team and how it changed the world by jere longman.

I’m going to age myself here, but I remember when the U.S. Women’s Team won the 1999 World Cup. It was an exciting time to be a girl! You looked up to heroes like Mia Hamm, the dominating player for Team U.S.A. In The Girls of Summer , esteemed New York Times journalist Jere Longman pulls back the curtain on that win and looks at the forces that shaped the victory. Longman traces how gender, race, and class interplayed in the team, as well as the sexualization of the players and how the male and female teams differed in the world’s eye.

How to read it: Purchase The Girls of Summer on Amazon

A good walk spoiled: days and nights on the pga tour by john feinstein.

Widely considered one of the best sports books ever, John Feinstein’s A Good Walk Spoiled details life on the PGA Tour. As he traveled alongside golf greats like Nick Price and Paul Azinger, Feinstein came to understand the relentless pressure, the grueling pace, and the palpable glory that was for the taking for players on “The Tour.”

How to read it: Purchase A Good Walk Spoiled on Amazon

Heaven is a playground by rick telander.

The best sports book don’t have to feature professional teams; in Heaven Is a Playground, the author profiles amateur basketball games in the summer of 1974 in Brooklyn. It’s definitely a classic. Read it and see why President Barack Obama called it “The best basketball book I’ve ever read” in 2005. This underrated read is surely one of the best nonfiction sports books.

How to read it: Purchase Heaven Is a Playground on Amazon

The imaginary girlfriend by john irving.

You might know author John Irving from his fiction books, like The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules . But Irving had another love, other than penning beloved bestselling books: wrestling. As a teen at the elite boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy, Irving was a dominant wrestler, a sport he participated in for twenty years, eventually becoming a referee and later a coach until he way forty-seven. This memoir that is both a coming-of-age story as well as a personal retrospective on how athletics left a lifelong impact on the author, certainly one of the best sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase The Imaginary Girlfriend on Amazon

Little girls in pretty boxes: the making and breaking of elite gymnasts and figure skaters by joan ryan.

I remember checking this book out of my high school library during my freshman year and tearing through it. For many, gymnastics and ice skating are fun spectator sports we watch during the Olympics, a “Wow!”-filled experience. But in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes , Joan Ryan looks at what goes on behind the scenes, away from the medal stands, to reveal what happens between commercials when the cameras are off. It’s a damning account of how gymnastics and figure skating is unbelievably dangerous and often puts young girls in the hand of emotional, physical, and sexual abusers. In the most recent edition of this book, there’s a new forward that addresses the most famous case of sexual assault in the USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar. It’s no shocker that Little Girls in Pretty Boxes went on to become a feminist classic and one of the best nonfiction sports books.

How to read it: Purchase Little Girls in Pretty Boxes on Amazon

Loose balls: the short, wild life of the american basketball association by terry pluto.

This funny, engaging read—certainly one of the best sports books of all time—shines a spotlight on the American Basketball Association (the ABA), which was the first effort to great a national basketball league in America. The ABA had six seasons which proved to be incredibly influential, with its groundbreaking features like the 3-point shot, on the eventaul NBA. Terry Pluto’s Loose Balls is an incredibly entertaining look at this short-lived league that left a long shadow on the sport. (For more on the ABA, check out the Wikipedia article .)

How to read it: Purchase Loose Balls on Amazon

Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game by michael lewis.

Adapted as a feature film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game profiles the Oakland A’s baseball team. Even though they had a small budget, the organization used key in-game statistics (also called sabermetrics ) to assemble a winning team. Moneyball ranks high on any list of the best books about sports.

How to read it: Purchase Moneyball on Amazon

Never die easy: the autobiography of walter payton by walter payton.

In case you haven’t heard of football star Walter Payton, his life and remarkable career is definitely worth exploring. As the—to this day—leading running back in the NFL’s history and the star who led the Chicago Bears to their one and only Super Bowl championship, Payton became a famous icon in American sports. In Never Die Easy , Payton welcomes readers into his amazing career and life. It’s an autobiography that feels vivid and urgent and surely one of the best sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase Never Die Easy on Amazon

The noble hustle: poker, beef jerky, and death by colson whitehead.

Author Colson Whitehead is perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad , but before that success, he was assigned a story from Grantland magazine to cover the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. The result is The Noble Hustle , an investigative reporting work of narrative nonfiction in which the writer becomes part of the story. This book is funny, insightful, quirky, and a wild ride and one of the most unconventional and appealing best nonfiction sports books.

How to read it: Purchase The Noble Hustle on Amazon

Open by andre agassi.

Surely one of the best sports books ever, Open is tennis star Andre Agassi’s deeply revealing autobiography. This memoir pulls you in and doesn’t let go, telling the astounding story of his rise to become perhaps the greatest male tennis player of all time. But behind the scenes of that amazing success, Agassi felt unfulfilled. In Open , he sheds light on his life away from the net, the good times, the bad times, and everything in between. Open is certainly one of the best selling sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase Open on Amazon

Paper lion: confessions of a last-string quarterback by george plimpton.

If you haven’t heard of the term “participatory sports journalism,” you’ll know it when you read George Plimpton’s Paper Lion . To write his book, Plimpton joined the Detroit Lions football team as an amateur quarterback. Plimpton practiced with the Lions during training camp. Although he didn’t make the roster, Plimpton had an extraordinary experience, which he details in his irreverent, quirky, and funny book, Paper Lion , definitely one of the most original books about sports.

How to read it: Purchase Paper Lion on Amazon

Playing for keeps: michael jordan & the world he made by david halberstam.

Michael Jordan was perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. And Playing for Keeps just might be the greatest book about Michael Jordan. In Playing for Keeps , Halberstam surveys the epic life, extraordinary career, and unmatched legacy of Michael Jordan, the star player for the Chicago Bears. Playing for Keeps is definitely one of the best sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase Playing for Keeps on Amazon

Rome 1960: the olympics that changed the world by david maraniss.

This intriguing book surveys the 1960 Olympics set in Rome, Italy. Subtitled “The Olympics That Changed the World,” Rome 1960 explores the intersection of many forces that made this more than just your usual Olympics, including the influence of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the dawning presence of female athletes. This book expertly untangles all of these strands to show how pivotal the Olympics of 1960 was radically different and incredibly influential.

How to read it: Purchase Rome 1960 on Amazon

Seabiscuit by laura hillenbrand.

The racing horse Seabiscuit was a sensation during his time; in 1938, he received more press coverage than Hitler, Mussolini, and FDR. Yet his stunning success was no fluke but rather the perfect convergence of three men who helped make the horse a decorated athlete and perhaps the greatest race horse of all time, including millionaire owner Charles Howard, mustang braker trainer Tom Smith, and quirky jockey Red Pollard. Together, the trio helped Seabiscuit become the horse no one could have predicted. Read all about it in Laura Hillenbrand’s compulsively readable book Seabiscuit , a top best selling sports books.

How to read it: Purchase Seabiscuit on Amazon

A sense of where you are: bill bradley at princeton by john mcphee.

In A Sense of Where You Are , famed New Yorker writer John McPhee shines a light on the famed basketball player Bill Bradley in the years when he played for the Princeton Tigers. Bradley would later go on to play for New York Knicks and become a U.S. Senator, but, in this book, McPhee focus on the years before Bradley’s professional and political career took off. It’s a book about raw talent, incredible drive, and unbridled ambition and ranks high among this list of the best sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase A Sense of Where You Are on Amazon

Shoe dog: a memoir by the creator of nike by phil knight.

In Shoe Dog , the creator of Nike tells of his awe-inspiring rise from a startup to becoming the leading athletic shoe company. This is a list of the best sports books, but sports would not be the force it was it without the Nike shoes that athletes use today more than ever.

How to read it: Purchase Shoe Dog on Amazon

The sweet science by a.j. liebling.

This collection of boxing essays by the great New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling covers pivotal moments in the history of the sport, including the comeback of Sugar Ray Robinson, the emergence of prodigy Rocky Marciano, and the decline of Joe Louis. With Liebling’s eye for finding the human moments among a brutally violent sport distinguish this collection as a must-read for any boxing, or sports in general, fan.

How to read it: Purchase The Sweet Science on Amazon

The system: the glory and scandal of big-time college football by jeff benedict and armen keteyian.

I included this book in my roundup of the best football books , and I’m including it here because it brings a much-needed perspective on the industry of college football. And yes, I’m saying “industry” because college football is no longer just a more innocent version of pro ball. In The System , the the authors peel back the layers to focus on the athletes, their highly paid coachers, and the networks making billions off the sport. It’s a book that all football fans should read. The System is definitely up there with the best books about sports.

How to read it: Purchase The System on Amazon

Those guys have all the fun: inside the world of espn by andrew miller and tom shales.

Sports and ESPN go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. In Those Guys Have All the Fun , authors Andrew Miller and Tom Shales take a deep dive into the most-famous sports network. Drawing on more than 500 interviews with ESPN staffers past and present, plus renowned athletes, Miller and Shales expose ESPN for what it is: an undeniable force, albeit one with scandal, rivalries, and conflict. Those Guys Have All the Fun proves that the best sports books don’t have to be about what happens on the field but rather behind the camera.

How to read it: Purchase Those Guys Have All the Fun on Amazon

Three-ring circus: kobe, shaq, phil, and the crazy years of the lakers dynasty by jeff pearlman.

This book takes a hard look at how the Los Angeles Lakers became a legend and a dynasty. From Kobe to Shaq, the 1996-2004 years of success were marked by celebrity athletes, ruthless management, and unparalleled talent. Read all about it in Three-Ring Circus .

How to read it: Purchase Three-Ring Circus on Amazon

Thrown by kerry howley.

In Thrown , Kerry Howley profiles two men in the mixed martial arts pantheon. Howley followed these fighters, one an established, aging, and tested athlete the other an up-and-coming prodigy. Mixed martial arts has never been so interesting than this emotionally visceral, compelling book and its unflinching look at the brutal mixed martial arts sport. This irreverent, gut-wrenching story is one of the best sports books of all time.

How to read it: Purchase Thrown on Amazon

Tiger woods by jeff benedict.

Tiger Woods is undeniably the most famous golfer of all time. Yet scandal has followed his success. In this biography from Jeff Benedict, Woods is revealed for the prodigious, complicated, ambitious golfer—and man—that he is. This is for certain one of the best sports books for readers who want to understand the grit that follows the glamor of life as a professional athlete. This is certainly one of the best sports biographies books.

How to read it: Purchase Tiger Woods on Amazon

Undisputed truth by mike tyson.

And now for the last installment in this roundup of the best sports books… Perhaps the most controversial yet successful boxer of our modern era is Mike Tyson, the dynamic and bombastic athlete who upended traditions of decor and performance to become the winner he was. In Undisputed Truth , Tyson tells all. It’s an unputdownable autobiography that any fan of sports will want to read.

How to read it: Purchase Undisputed Truth on Amazon

And there you have it the best sports books of all time. which one will you read first, share this:.

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Sarah S. Davis is the founder of Broke by Books, a blog about her journey as a schizoaffective disorder bipolar type writer and reader. Sarah's writing about books has appeared on Book Riot, Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, BookRags, PsychCentral, and more. She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Library and Information Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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24 Best Sports Biographies Books of All Time

Our goal : Find the best Sports Biographies books according to the internet (not just one random person's opinion).

• Type "best sports biographies books" into our search engine and study the top 5+ pages.
• Add only the books mentioned 2+ times.
• Rank the results neatly for you here! 😊 (It was a lot of work. But hey! That's why we're here, right?)

(Updated 2024)

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Last Updated: Monday 1 Jan, 2024

• Best Sports Biographies Books

An Autobiography

Andre Agassi

Born to Run

A hidden tribe, superathletes, and the greatest race the world has never seen.

Christopher McDougall

The Blind Side

Evolution of a game.

Michael Lewis

A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight

The Final Pitch

Barbarian Days

A surfing life.

William Finnegan

Eleven Rings

The soul of success.

Phil Jackson

Tiger Woods

Jeff Benedict

Michael Jordan

Roland Lazenby

The Boys in the Boat

Nine americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 berlin olympics.

Daniel James Brown

A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand

The Mamba Mentality

Kobe Bryant

Touching the Void

Joe Simpson

An American Legend

Rafael Nadal

Alone on the Wall

Alex Honnold

Mariano Rivera

The Captain

The journey of derek jeter.

Ian O'Connor

My Autobiography

Steven Gerrard

The Story of My Life

Coming Back Stronger

Unleashing the hidden power of adversity.

The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero

David Maraniss

• The 33 Best Sports Books Ever Written | Esquire www.esquire.com
• The best sports books and autobiographies - Pan Macmillan www.panmacmillan.com
• The 25 Best Sports Books of All Time To Read in 2021 – SPY spy.com
• 50 Great Sports Biographies - Sports Management Degree Guide www.sports-management-degrees.com
• 100 Best Sports Biography Books of All Time (Updated for 2021) www.shortform.com

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13 Of The Best Sports Biographies Ever Written

Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig

Muhammad Ali needs no introduction. This book draws on more than 500 interviews with those who knew him best, including friends, family members and mentors. Thanks to some specially commissioned research, it paints a vivid picture of one of the most significant personalities of the 20th century. Readers are taken inside the ring for some of the most famous bouts in boxing history, before learning about Ali’s activism, conversion to Islam, personal life – which included several affairs and controversies – and his decline from Parkinson’s disease. 

Available here

Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough by Duncan Hamilton

Brian Clough made a name for himself as the outspoken non-nonsense manager of Nottingham Forest during the mid-70s. Those who knew him say he was unpredictable and volatile, relying on alcohol to deal with failure and success on and off the pitch. Duncan Hamilton was a young journalist in the middle of Clough’s empire who saw it all. In this book, he paints a vivid portrait of Clough, from Nottingham Forest's double European Cup triumph to his descent into alcoholism.

The Death of Pantani by Matt Rendell

Italian cyclist Marco Pantani is widely regarded as one of the sport’s greatest. His unrivalled stamina and climbing abilities led to historic wins at the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia in 1998 – becoming one of only seven men to win both in the same year. Just six years later, Pantani was found dead in a cheap hotel. The autopsy revealed he had cerebral edema and heart failure as a result of cocaine poisoning. It transpired that he’d been addicted to coke for 15 years. This account includes exclusive interviews with his psychoanalysts, family and friends, who paint an indelible picture of an extremely talented – and flawed – athlete. 

Proud by Gareth Thomas

In 2009, Gareth Thomas made headlines around the world when he announced he was gay. One of the few top athletes to have come out, Thomas made news again a decade later when he revealed he was HIV positive. For years, he’d been hiding who he really was, but on the pitch, he had it all – national hero, sporting icon, leader of men, and captain of Wales and the British Lions. For Thomas, rugby was an expression of cultural identity, but his secret was slowing killing him, and he was scared what would happen to his wife and family if news got out. Thomas’ inspiring and moving story has given him – and his readers – a fresh perspective on what masculinity really means. 

Open. An Autobiography by Andre Agassi

Andre Agassi is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. But, as talented as anyone, he quickly came to hate the game. Coaxed to swing a racket while still in the crib, forced to hit hundreds of balls a day by his violent father, Agassi resented the constant pressure, even as he drove himself to become a prodigy. After winning the Wimbledon Championships in 1992, he became a fan favourite. What makes this book so captivating is Agassi’s near-photographic memory – every pivotal match is described as if it took place yesterday, while personal highlights (like his brief fling with Barbra Streisand) are colourfully recounted. 

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography and made its way onto Obama’s summer reading list back in 2016. For many, surfing is an adrenalated hobby, but for some it’s more than that. New Yorker writer William Finnegan started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days takes readers on a journey through a life spent chasing waves across the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Describing the intense relationship between himself, the board and the water, Finnegan details his most dangerous surfs and razor-sharp survival instincts in the water. A fascinating and compelling read from a man battling a “beautiful addiction”.

Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

His career wasn’t always plain sailing, but Sir Alex Ferguson eventually became the greatest football manager of his generation. A player back in the 60s and 70s, Ferguson went on to manage a string of Scottish teams before taking charge of Manchester United for nearly 30 years. Here, he reflects on a managerial career that included unprecedented European success for Aberdeen and many triumphant seasons with United, and reveals how he stayed sane at the peak of his profession. An entertaining, insight-filled must-read for all football fans. 

Put Me Back On My Bike by William Fotheringham

Tom Simpson was one of Britain’s most successful cyclists until his tragic death on the barren moonscape of the Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France – aged just 30 years old.  A man of contradictions, Simpson was one of the first cyclists to admit to using banned drugs, and was accused of fixing races, but he still managed to inspired awe and affection. Put Me Back on My Bike revisits the places and people associated with Simpson to show how he became a sporting legend in just a few short years.

Coming Back To Me by Marcus Trescothick

England cricketer Marcus Trescothick surprised fans and teammates when he prematurely ended his international career. At 29, Trescothick was widely regarded as one of the batting greats. With more than 5,000 Test runs to his name and eternal status as a 2005 Ashes hero, he’d already achieved more than he’d set out to. On Saturday 25th February 2006, four days before leading England into the first Test against India, Trescothick walked from the field in the midst of a mental breakdown. In the dressing room, he broke down in tears, overwhelmed by a blur of anguish, uncertainty and sadness he had been keeping at bay for longer than he knew. His account of performing at the top highlights an important conversation about the unique pressures and mental struggles many athletes face.

Undisputed Truth by Mike Tyson

No doubt Mike Tyson was a phenomenal boxer. But some of his antics in and outside the ring are much more questionable. There’s the rape conviction early in his career, the biting off of Evander Holyfield’s ear, and the cocaine addiction which led to his bankruptcy in the early noughties. In his own words, Tyson’s talks openly and movingly about a troubled childhood (he was arrested 38 times before he was 13), his financial ruin, and playing up to his ‘bad boy’ persona on a world stage.

The Accident Footballer by Pat Nevin

Pat Nevin never wanted to be a professional footballer, but went on to captivate audiences around the world with his quick footwork in the wing. Growing up in Glasgow's East End, he loved playing football, but he also loved reading classic literature, nights out with his mates, and listening to indie music until the early hours. With spells at Chelsea and Everton, Nevin became a household name, but here he discusses the joys of professional football alongside its contradictions and conflicts – and what it means to be defined by your job.

Lewis Hamilton: The Biography by Frank Worrall

Sir Lewis Hamilton has redefined British racing, and what it means to be a Black athlete at the top of the game. In this new biography, Frank Worrall charts his rise to stardom, starting with Hamilton's debut season in 2007, which won him fans around the world. Hamilton’s performance on the track has led to legendary status, but his personal life has also landed him on the front pages of the tabloids time and again. Then in 2021 he received a knighthood, making his unexpected journey to the top even more unbelievable. 

The Mamba Mentality: How I Play by Kobe Bryant

American basketball great Kobe Bryant spent his entire 20-year career with the LA Lakers. Then, in January 2020 he tragically died alongside his daughter and seven others in a helicopter crash in California. Known as ‘Black Mamba’, he was a master of mental preparation and using a unique game plan to win time and again. Written before his untimely death, this book takes readers inside the mind of one of the most intelligent, analytical and creative sportsmen ever.

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Best Sports Books: Top 10 Athlete Biographies [2024 Update]

Posted by Rubin Alaie | The Best Book Lists | 2

What are the best sportsbooks in recent years? Here you will find a top 10 with the most beautiful sports biographies to be inspired by top athletes, including football players and other top athletes.

Contents of this page:

The top 10 best books about sports

Criteria for compiling these recommended books.

Our editors have carefully read as many as possible books about this subject. Then, they used the following criteria for choosing the best picks: ⠀

• The literary quality of the books.
• The amount of books sold worldwide.
• The professional reviews in newspapers.
• The expertise and experience from the author.
• The quality of the examples, knowledge and practicality
• The actuality and whether the information is useful or too old.
• Our editor’s opinions: they have read and judged the books extensively.

Full disclosure: as Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases.

1.The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire

The way the author weaved the narrative of the establishment and endurance of the NFL through the point of view of these five men was engaging from start to finish. A must-read for any NFL fans looking to gain a unique understanding of the birth of their beloved sport.

2.Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II 

An absolute necessity read for baseball darlings, history buffs, and any individual who wants to be taken back to a period of genuine legends. This is simply a must-read for anyone out there with eyes! A unique and jaw-dropping tale that is not to be missed.

3.The Mamba Mentality: How I Play

Our pick for any Kobe Bryant fans out there. This book has become even more relevant in recent years after the passing of the basketball lessons. From start to finish, this is an inspiring read that looks at both Bryant’s extraordinary talent and the man behind it.

4.The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told: Thirty Unforgettable Tales from the Diamond

This is the perfect Christmas present for any baseball fans out there. 30 individual and unique stories that often go untold. Interesting from start to finish and each story feels as if it has its own voice. A must-read for any die hard supporters of the sport.

5.One Shot at Forever: A Small Town, an Unlikely Coach, and a Magical Baseball Season

An extremely enjoyable book about communities and humble community games. For those who love a true rags-to-riches underdog tale, this is about as good as it gets. Any baseball fans out there who do not know this story simply must read about it now!

6.The Ultimate Football Trivia Book: 600 Questions for the Super-Fan

If you’re a true football fan, then this book is a must try. Our pick for anyone looking for a stocking filler for a football fan this Christmas. This book is a great test of football knowledge with 600 questions of varying difficulty. Not only will you have fun, but you will learn too!

7.The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told: A True Tale of Three Gamblers, The Kentucky Derby, and the Mexican Cartel

The story is incredible! The author is a genius! A jaw-dropping story told in such an amazing way. You do not have to be a gambling fan at all to enjoy this story. It’s a tale that grips you from the very first word to the last.

8.The Story of Baseball: In 100 Photographs

The perfect gift for any baseball fans. There are plenty of information and trivia books out there but this book looks to compile the most important and game-changing moments in baseball in 100 photographs, from humble beginnings to finals viewed by millions.

9.Shoot Your Shot: A Sport-Inspired Guide To Living Your Best Life

For any young sport-lover growing up, no matter where they are, how wealthy they are, or what their dreams are, this is the book for them. Inspirational from the first word until the last, the author Vernon creates such a powerful guide to finding happiness in life.

10.Rising Above: How 11 Athletes Overcame Challenges in Their Youth to Become Stars 

Recommended for every sports lover. Real life always beats fiction! This book outlines 11 famous athletes who faced huge challenges in their early years but came out the other side stronger than ever. Eye-opening, informative and inspirational!

What do you find in these top 10 biographies of elite athletes?

Stacks of football books seem to be written every year. What is a good choice from this? In this list you won’t necessarily find the very best sports books ever, but they are certainly inspiring and poignant.

Also for children it is good to read some of these books about football and other sports, for example so that they know exactly how someone became successful or so that they become familiar with the pitfalls of being famous.

Biography books football players and other athletes : o ther recommendations outside the top 10

• I am Zlatan and Ik Zlatan are indispensable to learn what goes into the way Zlatan Ibrahimovic lives, thinks and plays. He has grown into a football player who continues to surprise and never disappoint.
• I think therefore I play – Andrea Pirlo
• I f you are specifically looking for good soccer books, check out these recommendations.

Enjoy reading!

Related: also read this...

About the author.

Rubin Alaie

Hello! Thanks for reading these articles. My intention is to make happiness as simple and clear as posssible. By the way, excuse my English. I am not a native English speaker since I live in Amsterdam. Much appreciated if you use the comments to make suggestions on my grammar. See ya in another blogpost!

Tags: sport biography

Dear, taste is always personal but still strange and unfortunate that the biography of the German goalkeeper Ronald Enke: “A life too short” by Ronald Reng is not mentioned here. A truly fantastic biography that stands out from many other popular biographies. One to really read!

Thank you for adding Stein 🙂

Further Reading (Related)

Full disclosure.

As Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases. Furthermore, certain content that appears on our our website, comes from Amazon. This content provided is ‘as is’ and is subject to change.

We earn a commission for products purchased through some links in this article.

The 35 Best Sports Books Ever Written

Fill the gaps between watching sport with the greatest writing about Muhammad Ali, Brian Clough, Diego Maradona and more

We’re not the first to observe that the thing about sport is that it comes with a built-in narrative arc. There will be heroes and there will be villains. There will be triumphs and there will be disappointments. There will be winners and there will be losers (unless it’s a sport like football which, to Ted Lasso’s continuing befuddlement, allows for a “tie”). But what happens off the pitch, or outside the field, or court-side, can often be as dramatic – if not more so – than what happens on, as it takes a certain type of person to excel at sport: gifted, driven, and sometimes, yes, a little psychotic.

A Woman's Game: The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Women's Football by Suzy Wrack (2022)

Timed to land just as the Lionesses started their tilt at winning the Euros and immortality, the Guardian's Suzy Wrack traces women's football from the mid-Great War, post-Suffragette days when huge crowds would flock to see women's teams – Dick, Kerr's Ladies drew 53,000 to Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920 – to a backlash that saw women banned from playing on FA pitches between 1921 and 1971 on the grounds that football was "unsuitable for females". Then, the slow climb back to prominence, and a big decision to make: does women's football try to 'catch up' with the global reach of the men's game, or make the most of what makes it different and joyful? This is a thorough run through a backstory which rarely used to make the back pages.

The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football by David Goldblatt (2014)

In the men's game, however, things have rarely been more weird. At the time of writing, Manchester United may still be bought out by former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Jassim, and the season has stretched into late June thanks to a mid-winter World Cup. How did we get here? Goldblatt shows how English football as we know it was liquidated and reformed as an entertainment product to beat them all in the wake of the Thatcher years, knitting it together with the ways England itself has changed in the 21st century. A lot has changed in the last decade – Chelsea cop a lot of flak, despite the ownership now looking positively quaint next to Manchester City and Newcastle United – but to understand how we got here, start with this.

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (2015)

Finnegan’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning memoir about his lifelong obsession with surfing – starting in California as kid, then Hawaii as a teen, taking him right though to New York in the present (a lesser-known surf spot, certainly) – is a searing and startling paean to the sport. Yes it can seem pointless, and yes it can be punishing, but Finnegan is able to encapsulate the feeling of freedom and euphoria like few others, while also describing his own meandering personal history, which somehow transformed him from a twentysomething stoner surf-bum into a renowned political journalist for the New Yorker, particularly for his reporting from Apartheid-era South Africa.

Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son by John Jeremiah Sullivan (2004)

Like so many of the titles on this list, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s first book – printed in the UK for the first time in 2013 after the success of his brilliant 2012 essay collection, Pulphead – is a sports book but also something more. It began as a consideration of the life of his late father, Mike Sullivan, who had been a sportswriter for a Kentucky newspaper, and whose fascination with sport in general, and with horse racing in particular, his son had never quite managed to understand. In telling the story of the legendary racehorse Secretariat, one of whose Kentucky derby wins his father attended, he unpicks a sport that is both fascinating and mystifying in equal measure.

Land of Second Chances: The Impossible Rise of Rwanda’s Cycling Team by Tim Lewis (2013)

If sport can be accused of providing neat story arcs (see intro!), or clear-cut heroes and villains, Lewis’s British Sports Book Award-winning exploration of the attempt – by a group of American former professional cyclists – to set up a cycling team in Rwanda a decade after the genocide there in which 1 million people were slaughtered, is as nuanced and fascinating as they come. Lewis, a contributing editor to Esquire , spent time in Rwanda with the would-be riders, including the talented Adrien Niyonshuti, who lost six brothers in the 1994 genocide, and also the professionals who helicopter in to set up the country’s first team, but who, in the case of coach Jock Boyer, turns out to have a dark past of his own.

Football Against The Enemy by Simon Kuper (1994)

Football against the enemy.

Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper wrote this accomplished and quirky footballing travelogue when he was still only in his early 20s. And it's remarkably good; arguably the first and even best in the now-not-so-new wave of 'literary' football tomes that have followed in ever-greater numbers. Kuper travels to 22 countries to find out how football has shaped individual national politics and culture – and vice versa – meeting players, politicians and picking up anecdotes and observations along the way. We all know football as a global obsession, but these fascinating tales – from the tragic to the bizarre – show just how far its reach extends.

Touching The Void by Joe Simpson (1988)

Simpson's harrowing account of his and Simon Yates's calamitous assault, in 1985, on Siula Grande, Peru, has rightly transcended the sport of climbing and become a legendary fable for what humans are capable of doing to survive. It centres, of course, on one of the most amazing escapes ever achieved: with Simpson hopelessly hanging off one end of a rope, Yates is faced with cutting it to prevent them both being killed. Somehow, Simpson survives the fall. But alone in a crevasse with a shattered leg, his situation is hopeless. What follows is a staggering tale of will and courage that also addresses the perennial question of what drives people to climb mountains in the first place. As Churchill said: "When you're going through hell, keep going".

A Good Walk Spoiled: Days And Nights On The PGA Tour by John Feinstein (1995)

Even if you're not a golf fan – though it certainly helps if you are – this groundbreaking account of the highs and lows of the 1993/4 season on the American pro circuit is ultimately a human drama. With unprecedented access to the stars – Greg Norman, Nick Price, John Daly and Nick Faldo to name just a few – and rookies alike, it reveals the disparate personalities and personal travails behind the TV images and how these combine with the particular demands of a sport where the margins between success and failure are so thin. A gripping and always entertaining account of what can justifiably be called the cruellest sport of all, whatever your level.

Addicted by Tony Adams (1998)

Harpercollins pub ltd addicted.

Adams was still a regular for Arsenal and England when his jaw-droppingly frank autobiography was published at the start of the 1998–99 season. His drinking problem destroyed him personally yet seemed to leave his football unaffected (wearing bin bags under training kit to sweat out the booze served him well). If any stories were left out, they must have been truly hideous. Here are remembrances of picking through jeans on the bedroom floor to find the least-piss-soaked pair to wear. Expect fights, prostitutes, broken lives, redemption.

Paper Lion by George Plimpton (1966)

To millennial sportswriters who never leave the office (or sofa) to live blog sport on TV, Plimpton’s participatory journalism (“that ugly descriptive”, in his words) must seem preposterous and grand. That Plimpton himself came across ever so slightly preposterous and grand was not lost on the man himself, who pricked that public persona with a terrifically witty, inquisitive writing style that worked best applied to sport. Of his five books about taking part in pro-level match-ups in boxing, baseball, ice hockey, golf and US football, Paper Lion , on the latter, is the finest.

Pocket Money by Gordon Burn (1986)

Burn, known for his mixing of fiction with non-fiction in the New Journalism style, spent a year documenting snooker during its mid-Eighties’ boom, and produced one of the lesser-known classics of British sportswriting. Reading it now, Burn is not the Hunter S of the green baize: his write-up is as straight as Steve Davis’s cue action, yet all the better for it. Every endorsement deal, every shit hotel room from Stoke to Guangzhou, every hour on the practice table, every string pulled by the promoter Barry Hearn: Burn recorded the lot with great skill.

Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough by Duncan Hamilton (2007)

“A spurious intimacy evolves between you,” writes Hamilton, of the relationship between a football club reporter and the club’s manager. In his case, from the age of 18 for two decades in Nottingham, with Clough, “an extraordinary journey with a contradictory, Chinese box of a man — idiosyncratic, eccentric, wholly unpredictable.” Clough’s one-liners are magnificent, for example, on a time before blanket player representation: “the only agent back then was 007 — and he shagged women, not entire football clubs.” Hamilton’s poignant, revealing book is a wonder.

I Think Therefore I Play by Andrea Pirlo (2013)

Sh123 andrea pirlo: i think therefore i play.

I Am Zlatan is held up as the foreign footballer’s must-read memoir, but entertaining though the Swede’s book is, time spent rubbing up against his ego isn’t so enlightening. Pirlo’s, however, has the sort of insight you’d expect from the thinking man’s Greatest Player of his Generation. "You won’t believe me, but it was right in that very moment," about to take the first penalty in the 2006 World Cup Final shoot-out, "I understood what a great thing it is to be Italian. It’s a truly priceless privilege." Also learned: he adores video-game football and always plays as Barça.

Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich (1980)

As mid-life crises go, Barich’s, aged 35, is special. Five rejected novels, mother and mother-in-law dead of cancer five weeks apart, no money, no job, wife with suspected brain tumour. Craving structure, he found it only studying the Daily Racing Form , picking horses methodically and placing small bets. He then told his wife (tumour: false alarm), he’d be moving to a motel next to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Fields racetrack, “convinced there was something special about racing and I wanted to get to the heart of the matter.” There was. He did. His write-up of that time is spectacularly good.

Ball Four by Jim Bouton (1970)

On the face of it, a diary of the 1969 season by a second-string pitcher for the Seattle Pilots baseball team, the only year that team existed, does not leap to the top of the to-read pile. But the total frankness in terms of locker-room talk, player drug use and womanising, bad blood, gamesmanship and other off-topic matters means this is the most inside-a-team book you’ll ever read. It offended baseball so much, Bouton’s 1971 follow-up was called I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally . David Simon, creator of The Wire , put Ball Four in his six all-time favourite books.

The Damned United by David Peace (2006)

Faber & faber the damned utd.

Brian Clough (see elsewhere on this list) spent 44 days as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Peace’s self-styled “fiction, based on a fact” unpacks this mistake via an unrelenting Clough inner monologue that brings the great man vividly to life. (The Clough family, and Leeds’ Johnny Giles disagreed, the latter winning an apology though the courts.) As a study of football partisanship, one of the game’s most important emotions, it is astonishing. Said Gordon Burn (see elsewhere on the list), “if the English novel needs a kick up the pants... consider it wholeheartedly kicked.”

Muhammad Ali by various

Taschen gmbh greatest of all time: a tribute to muhammad ali.

The Greatest has a whole shelf to himself in the sporting library (including, naturally, The Greatest Coloring Book of All Time ). Four books in particular stand out, together covering every angle you could wish for. Jonathan Eig’s Ali: a Life (2017) is the best cradle-to-grave account, as good on the flaws as the fabulous. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1999) by David Remnick focuses on the Clay-becomes-Ali era of the early Sixties. The Fight (1975) is Norman Mailer’s amazing retelling of the Rumble in the Jungle, and the giant, glossy Greatest of all Time (2003; 2010 reprint) by Taschen, is the coffee table book to top them all.

Slaying the Badger: LeMond, Hinault and the Greatest Ever Tour de France by Richard Moore (2011)

The badger, or more correctly, Le Blaireau , is Bernard Hinault, the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France and one of cycling’s all-time greats. Out to get him is his American teammate Greg LeMond, who finished second to Hinault in the 1985 Tour and wants the result reversed in 1986’s race. Reliving the latter contest, Moore forces the reader to pick sides — grizzled veteran versus young upstart, old ways versus new ways, USA versus France — which only heightens the drama. Journo props to Esquire contributor Moore, too, for tracking down both men more than 25 years later for illuminating postscripts.

Open by Andre Agassi (2009)

According to The New York Times : "one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete." Says Agassi: "I knew in the book I had to expose everything." So: the unceasing slog, from toddler to champ, that prevented him from loving tennis, or anything, until he met his second wife Steffi Graf. His failed first marriage to Brooke Shields, crystal meth: it’s all here. Props to Agassi and his quest for truth, and also his ghost, JR Moehringer, who got 250 hours of interview time with his subject instead of the typical 30.

All Played Out by Pete Davies (1990)

English football’s second-finest hour — Italia ’90 — led to its finest book. Having spent the year before the World Cup earning the trust of the England players and manager Bobby Robson, Davies was let into the camp during the tournament. He also observed, close-up, the press, fans and hooligans. An epic journey for the team and their chronicler, superbly told with sharp reportage, dry humour and real feeling. In 2010, the book was retitled One Night in Turin , to tie in with the documentary of the same name.

Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka (2011)

First, to get ahead of any Twitterstorm, we recognise the decision of cricket bible Wisden (the greatest annual sports book ever, of course) to stop using the term “chinaman” to describe a slow left-arm wrist-spin bowler. Such a player is one of cricket’s rare gems, and this novel is about a washed-up journalist trying to find a slow left-arm wrist-spinner who has faded from the spotlight. The author knows a lot about cricket, but he also knows a lot about myth, mystery, obsession, drinking and noble pursuits undertaken by the ignoble.

Mystery Spinner: the Story of Jack Iverson by Gideon Haigh (2002)

Hold your right hand out in front of you, palm facing you, fingers spread, then bend your middle finger at the knuckle. Now try bowling a cricket ball held between thumb and middle finger. Jack Iverson mastered it, and bamboozled batsmen so much that when he played for Australia, the captain, also Iverson’s club captain, would move players from other clubs around in the field so they couldn’t watch Iverson up close. This biography, by the writer many think is cricket’s current best (they’re correct), reveals, at times movingly, why Iverson didn't become an all-timer.

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (1992)

Hornby could not have imagined that his book would be relevant to the football fan’s experience 26 years after it was first published. (That it is still in print, after several bestselling years, would also be a surprise to him.) It’s harder for fans to follow Hornby’s best piece of advice — be seen reading the papers’ back pages on the first days of a new job, to attract fellow supporters — but he absolutely nails the inexorable pull of football fandom. And he had to do it all with boring, boring Arsenal.

Aurum Press Ltd Levels of the Game (Sports Classics)

Levels of the Game by John McPhee (1969)

This writers’ favourite began life, as most of its author’s books do, as an article in The New Yorker . It is an account of the 1968 US Open semi-final between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, a profile of both men and their place in US society at the time. Ashe is black, Democrat, bookish, skinny; Graebner the opposite. Every sportswriter ever has played the sport-is-life-and-life-is-sport card. In this slim volume, which punches far beyond its weight, McPhee plays it best of all.

The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro by Joe McGinniss (1999)

Castel Di Sangro is a small-time football club that miraculously rose through the Italian pyramid to Serie B’s second tier for the 1996–97 season. Equally extraordinary was the presence of McGinniss, a US writer famous for a revealing Richard Nixon book and true-crime doorsteps, as the upstarts’ Boswell. He had fallen hard for soccer after the 1994 World Cup and moved to Italy to document the fairy tale. Instead: corruption, cocaine smuggling, car crashes and conspiracy to go with the calcio .

Fast Company by Jon Bradshaw (1975)

Brilliant, evocative profiles of winning gamblers including Bobby Riggs (of the 1973 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match), pool legend Minnesota Fats and Tim Holland, backgammon’s best ever. The author, who wrote for Esquire , New York magazine and Vogue , understood these rascals because he admired and shared their qualities. In his introduction to a later edition, writer Nik Cohn remembers Bradshaw’s "conscious roguery, a Rothmans perpetually dangling from one corner of his mouth, and that lopsided shark’s grin plastering the other. He sported Turnbull & Asser silk shirts and Gucci loafers, flashed gold lighters and a Piaget watch." Touché.

Beware of the Dog by Brian Moore (2010)

England’s 64-cap hooker begins this second account of his life by effectively apologising for the less-than-candid nature of the first, then describing the sexual abuse he endured as a child, why he came to deal with it as an adult and what happened when he told his mum. It’s genuinely stunning. But this book is not on this list because of just one chapter. Everything that follows, including pissed-up rugby tales, personal and professional highs and lows, feels like it’s in the book for the same reasons as that prologue: honest, insightful and crucial to Moore’s life.

The Hand of God: the Life of Diego Maradona by Jimmy Burns (1996)

Burns was the right choice to decode Diego in the post- Fever Pitch wave of sportswriting. As the former FT man in Buenos Aires, he knew Argentina and its favourite son perhaps better than any other English-language writer. The beats of the player’s life are storyteller’s gold: shantytown upbringing, national team aged 17, FC Barcelona aged 22 (when he also had his first line of coke), World Cup winner aged 25, roaring into a camera at the World Cup, full of illegal stimulants, aged 33. Also: mafia, money, mayhem. Burns weaves it all together magnificently.

The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis (2006)

The blind side: evolution of a game.

Lewis’s Moneyball , about disruptive baseball analysis, often appears on lists of this sort, but The Blind Side is more entertaining, with a you-couldn’t-make-it-up human-interest core that some felt was over-egged in the film version starring Sandra Bullock. Back in the book, two stories are told: how a black US high-school football prospect (crack addict mother, dad killed in prison) changes after adoption by a rich white family, and how the game itself has changed with respect to the “blind side”, a quirk of player growth and tactics.

A Life Too Short: the Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng (2011)

Reng and Enke were planning to write a book together; Reng wrote it alone after Enke killed himself in November 2009. Three months peviously, Enke had kept goal for Germany for the last time. Three years earlier, his two-year-old daughter died after lifelong heart problems. More than once, the pressure of top-level football had come down hard. Rene uses Enke’s diaries, interviews with the keeper’s wife and family and the material the two men generated together in a masterful, moving account of depression and its devastating consequences. Once read, never forgotten.

The Death of Ayrton Senna by Richard Williams (1995)

Williams, former editor of Melody Maker and chief sportswriter of The Guardian , is both the man you want over your shoulder when playing HQ Trivia and the sort of writer who can make you listen to, or care about, someone you had no interest in before reading his take on them. Of course, Senna is beloved; even more so since the 2010 documentary biopic. Williams even-handedly dispels the myths surrounding the Brazilian’s remarkable life, his tragic death and the afterlife of his legend, yet maintains his heroic aura through concise, insightful analysis.

The Illustrated History of Football by David Squires (2016)

Squires has just completed another season of football cartoons for The Guardian , with no sign of let-up in quality, hilarity or niche Simpsons references. His first book, a history of the game with all-new work, is the funniest football tome since Viz ’s Billy the Fish Football Yearbook , published 26 years earlier. The second volume, The Illustrated History of Football: Hall of Fame , is more of the same excellence.

Full Time: the Secret Life of Tony Cascarino by Paul Kimmage (2000)

Everything you’d think the 21st-century footballer is advised to leave out of an autobiog is here: infidelity, itemised career earnings, dialogue with the internal voice of crippling self-doubt (“you pathetic fucker, Cascarino!”), mystery injections from club physios and, most candidly, the fact you were not really qualified to play for your country. “Tony Goal”, as the Republic of Ireland (perhaps) centre-forward was known in France, teamed with Irish writer Paul Kimmage, whose cycling book Rough Ride and rugby book Engage , had a shot at being on this list.

A Lot of Hard Yakka, Triumph and Torment by Simon Hughes (1997)

A lot of hard yakka.

“There’s nothing exceptional about me; never was,” claims Hughes, in what is the only duff note in a book that proves his statement incorrect. His lid-lift on the jobbing cricketer’s lot is a celebration of shortfalls, on and off the pitch. After all, what is sport if not mostly mediocrity punctuated by rare moments of glory and despair? Hughes has neither of those. He has kit sponsors rewarding improved performance with “a couple of short-sleeved casual shirts” and that time he interrupted coitus to turn over the Donna Summer tape. Very funny stuff.

My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach (2005)

Stewart Imlach played for Scotland at the 1958 World Cup and won the FA Cup with Nottingham Forest a year later. Now you know about as much about Stewart as did his son Gary when the old man died. Holding a cigarette card of his dad at a collectors’ fair a few months after the funeral, Gary laments, “How had I managed to let him die without properly gathering together the details of his career, his life story?” Surely doubly galling for Gary, the TV sports journalist, who had likely researched thousands of other sporting lives. This book triumphantly redresses his oversight.

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A New Biography Explores the Paradox of Pete Rose

T o read Keith O’Brien’s new book Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball is to experience a host of contradictory emotions, sometimes at the same time. O’Brien comprehensively documents the many triumphs of Pete Rose’s career — as well as the monumentally terrible decisions he made over the course of his time in baseball, including the gambling habit that led to his eventual lifetime ban from the game.

At a time when professional sports’ relationship to gambling has radically shifted, O’Brien’s book is also a cautionary tale, emphasizing precisely why some distance between the two might not be a bad thing. Charlie Hustle is a compelling book about a contradictory figure, but it’s also a vivid portrait of a particular period in sporting history.

InsideHook talked with O’Brien about the genesis of the project, writing about his hometown and Rose’s own involvement with the project.

InsideHook: Your roots are in Cincinnati. What do you remember of the Pete Rose scandal when it first happened?  Did it take a while for you to realize that this would be a good subject for you to take on, or is this something you’ve wanted to write about for a while?

Keith O’Brien: Yeah, so I’m born and raised in Cincinnati. I spent my whole childhood there. And I’m too young to remember the Big Red Machine years, the peak years of the mid-’70s. But I was 11 years old when Pete was traded back to the Reds in 1984. I was 12 when he set the all-time hit record in 1985. I remember exactly where I was that night when it happened. And I was a teenager when it all unraveled in 1989.

In a lot of ways, I lived it. I’m not part of the book at all. There’s no first person here. There’s no “me.” There’s no “I.” But I do remember what it felt like to be in Cincinnati at the peak of Pete’s career. And I do also remember what it felt like to be there when he lost it all. I used that emotion and my memories of those emotions to inform my reporting, if that makes sense.

As someone who’d read about players like Shoeless Joe Jackson getting a lifetime ban from the game, it was really shocking to watch that unfold with one of the greatest players who’s ever played the game during my lifetime. Although, as you pointed out in the book, Pete Rose having connections to gambling was not exactly a complete secret.

People may remember the broad strokes of what happened here, but I think in the 25 years since Pete Rose was banned from baseball and has made mistake after mistake off the field, we have forgotten why we ever cared about him in the first place. I wanted to go back and reconstruct that narrative.

In doing so, it’s clear that Pete Rose’s problems that led to his banishment in 1989 don’t start three months beforehand. They don’t start even a year or even three years before. I think you can trace the problems in his off-field mistakes back 20 or 30 years. Certainly, by the late 1970s, the idea that Pete Rose was a gambler and gambled a lot was well-known. And well-known even in the offices of Major League Baseball.

There are still scandals now surrounding athletes who bet on their own sports, but — when you were researching this, were you struck by the changes in the relationship between sports leagues and betting from Pete Rose’s era to now?

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t delve into the current changes in the book. My narrative really focuses on this 30-year window of time when Pete Rose was a professional baseball player, from 1960 to 1989.  But the current landscape does make for a great picture frame to put around this portrait. No one would have predicted 35 years ago when Pete was banned from baseball that sports gambling would one day be legal in most places. No one would have predicted that a decade ago. And it is fundamentally changing our culture. It’s fundamentally changing our relationship to sports. It’s fundamentally changing how we consume, view and discuss sports. And I think we’re just at the beginning. I mean, gambling was only legalized across America six years ago. We are just at the start. And I don’t think anybody has any idea where this is truly headed.

For the book, I interviewed Faye Vincent, the former Deputy Commissioner of Baseball in 1989, and then the subsequent Commissioner of Baseball. And my original interviews with Faye Vincent started three years ago, in 2021. Even then, Faye Vincent looking out over the landscape at that time was stunned by what he was seeing. And he told me that we haven’t seen this kind of cultural change since overturning Prohibition 100 years ago, and the sweeping legalization of alcohol. And just as no one knew where that was going to go, then no one knows where this is going now.

It’s been interesting seeing how English soccer is taking steps to reduce their overlap with gambling, like phasing out betting companies as jersey sponsors. That all of that’s been happening as the U.S. is charging pretty headlong into it feels like a cautionary tale just waiting to happen.

As gambling and advertising for gambling and the notion of gambling becomes more and more omnipresent in our sports coverage, I think people are already rebelling against what’s happened. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 to effectively allow states to decide for themselves what to do with gambling, it was like throwing open the door. There was no regulation whatsoever, at least on the federal level. It just happened on a state-by-state basis, and many states were ready to move because they wanted it. They wanted the tax revenue that gambling would provide.

In a matter of just a few years now, 38 states and the District of Columbia have legalized sports wagering in most of those places. We can do it on our phones, from our couches, from our seats at the stadium. We can place bets in-game, which again is something that just never happened before. In the ’70s and ’80s, Pete Rose couldn’t place a bet in-game. Bookies got their lines, their point spreads, often from a syndicate of other bookies, or sometimes from a syndicate of organized crime. You didn’t have lines that were adjusting at the moment.

So someone like Pete Rose placed his $2,000 bet, which was his standard bet, before a game, and then he watched the game. And now, we can all place our bet before the game, and then we can do it in the middle of the game, and at halftime, and then we can chase our losses in the third quarter, or in the eighth inning. I mean, it’s just something we’ve never seen before.

There were two personality traits of Pete Rose’s that came up a lot in the book. One was his penchant for gambling, but there was also a tireless work ethic, even beyond that of his teammates. You describe the way that he had a memory of every pitcher he’d ever faced that he could draw from over his career, for instance. His work ethic felt very admirable; his gambling felt tragic. Do you see these qualities as coming from the same place, or being in opposition to one another?

It’s absolutely coming from the same place. One element that I identified early on was that the same qualities that made Pete Rose an iconic baseball player are the same qualities that doomed him to failure as a person. On the field, he played with fury, he refused to bend, he would not be vulnerable, he would never want to be seen as weak, he would do anything to win. And, just as important, Pete Rose always believed that he would win, or he would prevail. He was — and actually is — an eternal optimist.

Those qualities served him well as a player. You know, the whole persona, the hustle, endeared him to fans, and his unwillingness to fail probably accounted for hundreds of hits as he battled and battled just to get on base. But those exact same qualities, this refusal to bend, this refusal to be vulnerable, this refusal to appear weak, and this enduring belief — that things will just work out for Pete Rose, that he can outwork the problem, he can outlast the problem, he will somehow escape in the end — are the exact same qualities that doom him to making poor decisions in his personal life, and poor decisions in 1989 and for years afterwards, when he won’t admit the truth and won’t admit that he bet on baseball.

I was surprised by some of the contradictory things that came up about Rose, from his dealings with his Black teammates — which were more progressive than one might have expected — to his relationship with a high school student, which sounded ethically and possibly legally out of bounds. Did you find your own perceptions of him changing as you worked on this book? 

Going into the project, I was, of course, aware of many of the dark places that Pete Rose had gone to over the course of his life and over the course of his career. And one of the goals of the book was to go to those places, too. And so I did that. What was difficult was doing interviews with people who had been hurt by Pete Rose.

Pete Rose has become, I think, almost like a partisan debate. There are people out there who love him and would walk through a wall of fire for Pete Rose. I interviewed those people. And there are people out there whose intersection with Pete forever changed their lives in negative ways. And I interviewed those people, too.

At times in interviews with those folks, in talking about something that happened, at times, 50 years ago, the pain was still right on the surface. And that was something that I hadn’t expected when I set out to do the project. But I did try to convey those emotions in the book, too, because I think it helped capture the entirety of the man.

The fact is, if you crossed paths with Pete Rose, especially at the peak of his fame in the ’70s or ’80s, it was often a singular moment in the lives of other people that would forever alter their lives as well.

Early in Charlie Hustle , you write that you had been in touch with Pete Rose and that he did seem to be open to talking to you for a while — and then at some point  broke off contact. Were you surprised that he was willing to talk to begin with, or was it more of a case of being surprised that after committing to speaking to you for the project, he eventually bowed out of it?

Nothing surprises me with Pete Rose. That’s one thing I’ve learned most of all. I mean, Pete Rose had never spoken before to an author for a book unless he had some kind of editorial control over the project. And I want to be clear, he did not have any control here. So I guess in that sense I was a little surprised that he was willing to talk to me — but again, not really.

I am originally from Cincinnati. My Cincinnati roots and connections helped open doors for me and got me an introduction to Pete Rose. And I’ll say that when I did get that introduction, Pete Rose was thrilled to talk.

I was very clear I wanted to tell the whole story here. I explained that I felt like it was a time for reckoning for him. He was in his early 80s when my reporting began, and to use the old sports cliche, we are all day-to-day. But when you’re in your early 80s that notion is especially present. I was offering Pete Rose a chance to reckon — maybe one last chance to reckon — with the past, and he was excited to talk.

But over the course of our time together, I did push him and did want to talk about everything, and I think I ultimately pushed him as far as he was willing to go. The fact that he stopped calling me back, I guess, in that sense, isn’t that surprising. He’s also done this before. I met many people over the course of my reporting who had once been in close contact with Pete, had once even been close friends with Pete, and he severed contact with them, for whatever reason. So he’s certainly done this sort of thing before.

You described that happening in the book as well, like when Rose and Johnny Bench went into business together and then all of a sudden it just fizzled out. Some kind of chill seems to have set in — which might have foreshadowed what was to come. 

That was a relationship that was filled with tension for lots of reasons — mostly involving ego and fame and importance in the city of Cincinnati. But Pete has severed contact over the years with all kinds of people — ex-lovers and girlfriends, reporters and even close friends.

Remembering the Night the Disgraced Hit King Was Crowned at First Base

The subtitle of the book includes the phrase “The Last Glory Days of Baseball,” and towards the end of it, when you wrote about the investigation into Pete Rose’s gambling and his suspension and the subsequent death of A. Bartlett Giamatti, you allude to the next scandal on the horizon for Major League Baseball. Do you think that focusing on gambling prevented the powers that be in Major League Baseball from anticipating the use of steroids and performance enhancing drugs?

I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think anyone was aware that players — and star players — were already using steroids in the summer of 1989. I do think there’s some pretty deep historical irony to the fact that during that summer, as baseball pursued Pete Rose — rightly so — players were already injecting themselves with steroids, at least in the clubhouse in Oakland.

I think that irony is meaningful because, in my opinion, the steroid scandal to come would have a far more devastating effect on baseball than this gambling scandal in 1989. I don’t mean to suggest that they shouldn’t have pursued Pete Rose; they were right to do so. Pete Rose’s relationships with bookies, his debts to bookies and his decision to bet on baseball and bet on his own team did put the game at risk, without question. It had to be investigated. 

One thing that’s stunning to me, looking back on it, is that investigation in 1989 which leads to the Dowd report — named after the lead investigator, John Dowd — is a stunningly accurate first draft of history. In a span of 10 to 12 weeks, John Dowd —  newly hired special counsel for Major League Baseball — and his team builds a dossier on Pete Rose that includes bank records and phone records and depositions with people who placed his bets on baseball and depositions with a bookie that took his bets on baseball. 

This report unravels years of lies, maybe more, and it’s completed even before the summer begins. I think that’s amazing, but looking back on it, it is ironic that while baseball was pulling out all the stops to get to the core of the truth of what Pete Rose was doing, it was blissfully unaware of the next scandal to come, the steroid scandal, which was absolutely destructive to the sport.

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Where Is Kate Middleton? All the Latest Drama Explained

The Princess of Wales’s sudden absence from public life is at the center of a media storm

We’re used to near-daily access to the British royal family. News outlets across the globe, including Bazaar , breathlessly cover the family members’ every move, from state banquets to charity events, international royal tours to local walkabouts. Countless photos of the family inundate our digital landscape, making these unreachable figures feel more like a thread intrinsic to the fabric of everyday life. This is what made the Princess of Wales’s abrupt disappearance from the public eye—due to a cancer diagnosis, as the world finally learned on March 22—feel so jarring.

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On January 17, Kensington Palace shared an uncharacteristically personal update on the princess’s health, revealing that she had been hospitalized for an abdominal surgery . While the palace has never specified what the surgery was for, it did note that her recuperation period meant we would likely not see Kate again until after Easter, which falls this year on March 31.

Unsurprisingly, public speculation over her whereabouts grew in the weeks that followed, with social media churning out new conspiracy theories to explain her absence seemingly every other day. Even an official portrait released by Kensington Palace failed to quell the controversy—and in fact served only to further fuel the rumor machine .

But Kate seems to have expected that reaction. “The Princess of Wales appreciates the interest this statement will generate,” the palace’s initial statement read. “She hopes that the public will understand her desire to maintain as much normality for her children as possible; and her wish that her personal medical information remains private.”

Over two months later, Kensington Palace finally released a video statement by Kate. In it, she explained she was undergoing preventative chemotherapy after doctors had found cancer during her abdominal surgery, and asked for time, space, and privacy for her family to deal with the health crisis.

Ahead, we break down all the legitimate information we have so far about Kate’s health situation—from her recovery to her expected return to public duties—and the events that surrounded her surgery, disappearance, and announcement. Make sure to watch this space for updates.

What surgery did Kate have?

On January 17, Kensington Palace announced Kate’s hospitalization for a “planned abdominal surgery,” but refrained from specifying the reason for the operation.

“The surgery was successful, and it is expected that she will remain in hospital for 10 to 14 days, before returning home to continue her recovery,” the statement read.

At the time, sources told Harper’s Bazaar the condition was not cancerous.

When will Kate return to royal duties?

When news of her surgery first broke, the palace said the princess was not expected to return to her duties until after Easter, which fell on March 31 this year. But that timeline changed on March 22, after Kate announced she had been diagnosed with cancer. A source told Harper’s Bazaar she was no longer expected to resume work on or soon after Easter, but rather: “The princess will return to official duties when she is cleared to do so by her medical team.”

Although we don’t yet know when that will be, the palace has released a few updates on her return-to-work status since then. In June, Us Weekly published a statement from a palace spokesperson that said, “We have been really clear that [Kate] needs the space and the privacy to recover right now. She will return to work when she has had the green light from doctors.”

While a source for the outlet alleged that Kate “may never come back in the role that people saw her in before,” a Bazaar royal insider claimed the opposite .

“There is no information about Kate’s ‘return’ because the focus at this moment in time is 100% on her health—to suggest she won't return to her role is unfair and untrue,” the source said. “Conversations of that nature are just not being had. When the time is right, she will resume her work.”

Why have we hardly seen Kate since her surgery?

Until her video statement, the palace kept mum on Kate’s progress after her surgery, releasing very few statements about and barely any photos of the princess, presumably in an effort to maintain her privacy.

The day her surgery was announced, the palace said Kate hoped “that the public will understand her desire to maintain as much normality for her children as possible; and her wish that her personal medical information remains private. Kensington Palace will, therefore, only provide updates on Her Royal Highness’s progress when there is significant new information to share.”

So where have we seen Kate?

Paparazzi captured the first public photos of the princess since Christmas on March 4; they showed the royal in sunglasses, in the passenger seat of a car driven by mom Carole Middleton. The photos were reportedly taken near Windsor Castle, where Kate has been recuperating.

Then, in celebration of the U.K.’s Mother’s Day on March 10, Kensington Palace released the first official photo of Kate since Christmas—a picture of her with her children. The portrait immediately generated buzz, as many social media users pointed out that certain elements appeared to have been edited. The controversy was exacerbated when the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images, and Reuters retracted distribution of the portrait just hours after its release. “At closer inspection it appears that the source has manipulated the image,” an AP notification explained.

The following day, March 11, Kate issued a rare personal apology for the mishap, admitting to having edited the photo. “Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she wrote in a statement posted to X. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day.” Subsequent analyses of the metadata confirmed that the photo file had been saved twice on Adobe Photoshop the previous week.

A source from Kensington Palace told Bazaar , “This was an amateur, family photograph taken by the Prince of Wales. [William and Kate] wanted to offer an informal picture of the family together for Mother’s Day.”

The source added that Kate had “made minor adjustments” to the picture, and that the family as a whole had spent the holiday “together and had a wonderful day .” The unedited original photograph will not be released.

On the same day the palace published Kate’s apology, paparazzi snapped photos of the princess riding in a car with William while leaving Windsor Castle. She was photographed with her head in profile, looking out the window, while William’s face was turned down.

On March 17, The Sun reported witnesses saying they’d spotted Kate and William visiting a market the day before, about a mile away from their Windsor home. TMZ later published a short video clip of the prince and princess’s visit, which showed Kate smiling and walking alongside William while dressed in a black hooded jacket, black yoga pants, and black sneakers.

“After all the rumors that had been going round, I was stunned to see them there,” a witness added. “Kate was out shopping with William, and she looked happy and she looked well. The kids weren’t with them, but it’s such a good sign she was healthy enough to pop down to the shops.”

On March 22, Kensington Palace released the first official video of Kate since her surgery, in which she announced she had been diagnosed with cancer.

There have been no known images or videos of Kate since she announced her cancer diagnosis, although multiple publications reported in late May that she had been sighted in public running errands and spending time with her kids.

What do we know about her recuperation period?

Kate was discharged from the London Clinic on January 29, nearly two weeks after her surgery.

“The Princess of Wales has returned home to Windsor to continue her recovery from surgery. She is making good progress,” the palace said in a statement at the time. “The prince and princess wish to say a huge thank you to the entire team at the London Clinic, especially the dedicated nursing staff, for the care they have provided. The Wales family continues to be grateful for the well wishes they have received from around the world.”

A royal source also told Bazaar , “The princess is in good spirits.”

On February 27, nearly a month after her release from the hospital, a source close to the family told Bazaar that Kate’s recovery was still going well.

On February 29, Kensington Palace released a statement that addressed the increasingly frenzied public speculation over Kate’s absence: “We were very clear from the outset that the Princess of Wales was out until after Easter and Kensington Palace would only be providing updates when something was significant.”

On March 13, a Kensington Palace insider gave Bazaar an exclusive update on the princess's health , revealing that she is “doing well, all things considered.” The insider added that she had even left Adelaide Cottage, the Waleses’ Windsor residence, at least three times within the past two weeks. On one outing, the source noted, Kate was “smiling, upbeat, and enjoying being out.”

Still, the speculation over her Photoshop scandal had “caused some stress for the princess,” the source added. “But she tends not to pay attention to online chatter or even the press. I think people forget that this was simply a mother wanting her family to look their best in a photograph that was going to be heavily scrutinized. She was protecting her children.”

On March 21, the palace told Bazaar that Kate was getting back into the groove of her royal duties by working from home. “The princess has been kept updated throughout the process,” a representative said. The Telegraph reported that Kate has been involved in a project focusing on improving the lives of newborn babies, an extension of her long-held passion for the field of early childhood development.

And then on March 22, the princess announced in a personal video that she had been diagnosed with cancer. “In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London, and at the time, it was thought that my condition was noncancerous,” she said in the clip, which was posted to social media accounts for the Prince and Princess of Wales. “The surgery was successful; however, tests after the operation found cancer had been present. My medical team therefore advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy, and I am now in the early stages of that treatment.”

Has Prince William said anything about Kate’s health?

On February 7, William resumed his royal duties for the first time since his wife’s surgery, to attend the annual fundraising gala for the London Air Ambulance. (The event also marked the prince’s first public outing since Buckingham Palace had announced King Charles’s cancer diagnosis on February 5.)

At the gala, William referenced the family’s recent bout of alarming health news. “I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you, also, for the kind messages of support for Catherine and for my father, especially in recent days. It means a great deal to us all,” he said in a speech, before jokingly adding, “It’s fair to say the past few weeks have had a rather ‘medical’ focus. So I thought I’d come to an air ambulance function to get away from it all!”

At another event held at Windsor Castle earlier that day, William offered some rare insight into the team guiding Kate through her recovery. According to a LinkedIn post shared by Trish Spruce—a recruiter for the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, who was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire at the investiture ceremony—the Prince of Wales “said that Catherine had two Filipino nurses looking after her and they were amazing and kind.”

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As an associate editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com, Chelsey keeps a finger on the pulse on all things celeb news. She also writes on social movements, connecting with activists leading the fight on workers' rights, climate justice, and more. Offline, she’s probably spending too much time on TikTok, rewatching Emma (the 2020 version, of course), or buying yet another corset. 

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