BEST OF THE REST: TRUE, THERE'S rarely an ordinary sporting year, even a less than vintage one usually delivers at least a few performances or events of the momentous kind. But thumbing through the pages of the Setanta Sports Yearbook, a beautifully compiled reflection on 2008, gives a reminder of just how many special sporting days the past 12 months produced.
The Yearbook, which features quite marvellous photography and over 30 pieces by an array of writers on the year's main events, is a good place to start when looking back at 2008, and the shortlist for the William Hill Irish Sports Book of the Yeara particularly useful guide to the best books it gave us.
Included in that list is the eventual winner, Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw, the autobiography of Dundalk racing driver Tommy Byrne who had a brief spell in Formula One in the early 1980s, and who Eddie Jordan described as being more naturally gifted than even Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna.
Byrne's life has been far from ordinary, his story - a soaring rise, followed by a catastrophic fall, before levelling out into some degree of normality - told here with an unguarded honesty by Byrne, who isn't slow to detail his own flaws and failings and his encounters with a bewildering assortment of characters who crossed his path over the years.
In comparison with Byrne's story Sonia O'Sullivan's progress through life has been positively serene, but as those who have followed her career will know she too has had to come through the most testing of times, on and off the track. It was only, she concedes, years after her father famously declared "Lads, nobody died" in Atlanta, where she dropped out of the 5,000 metres Olympic final, that she came to understand his sense of perspective, her response to the disappointment at the time to cry herself to sleep every night for two weeks.
In Sonia: My Story, she recounts, with candour, her darkest of days, as well as the good times that made her journey and struggle worth while. Also shortlisted this year for the Irish book of 2008 were two offerings from the world of horse racing, Mouse Morris - His Extraordinary Racing Lifeand Better than Sexby Mick Fitzgerald.
As the authorised biography of Morris, Declan Colley's book benefits from access to the man himself, and the trainer talks openly about the highs and lows of his life in the sport, as do jockeys, trainers, owners and stable lads who know him.
Fitzgerald, lest you forget, described his 1996 Grand National win on Rough Quest as "better than sex", and in his autobiography he gives a fascinating insight to his two decades as a jockey, and the changes in the sport since he started out. And, like Byrne, O'Sullivan and Morris's books, Fitzgerald is searingly honest about his life and career, as open about his shortcomings as he is about the success he enjoyed.
Also from horse racing came Brian O'Connor's Add A Zero, The Irish Times' racing correspondent's account of his efforts to convert €5,000 into €50,000 over the course of an Irish betting season. We are, need it be said, biased, but Brian's book had an unputdownable quality to it, a bit like the Wuthering Heights-meets-The Da Vinci Code of the horse racing world, only without the romance or Opus Dei. We won't tell you how he fared but his voyage was compelling, and, at times, just a bit boisterous.
Admirers of George Kimball's Irish Timescolumn will be drawn to American At Large, a collection of his weekly reflections on the sporting world in the US (all proceeds from the book go to Crumlin Children's Hospital).
The same author produced Four Kingsthis year, his widely acclaimed book on the " Last Great Era of Boxing", when Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Tommy Hearns and Roberto Duran ruled the roost. Kimball was ringside for the quartet's golden days, his memories of their most famous bouts refreshed by recent interviews with all four fighters.
After what was a great year for Irish boxing, the life of John Monaghan, the great Belfast flyweight from the 1940s, is the subject of a fond and highly enjoyable book by Eamonn O'Hara. Rinty Monaghan was the quintessential Belfast lad: he grew up in 32 Little Corporation Street and captured British, European, Commonwealth and World championship titles in a hectic two-year series of fights. O'Hara evokes the boxing scene in post World War Two Belfast, when Monaghan's rivalry with Scotland's Jackie Paterson was a fascination that went beyond the confines of fight fans.
Sonia: My Story, Sonia O'Sullivan with Tom Humphries, Penguin, €15.50
Mouse Morris - His Extraordinary Racing Life,Declan Colley, Collins Press, €22.99
Better than Sex,Mick Fitzgerald with Donn McClean, Highdown, €21.99
Add A Zero, Brian O'Connor, Hachette, €12.99
American At Large, George Kimball, Red Rock, €20.00
Four Kings, George Kimball, Mainstream, €12.99
Rinty: Story of a Champion, Eamonn O'Hara, Brehon, €18.95
Crashed and Byrned: The Greatest Racing Driver You Never Saw, Tommy Byrne with Mark Hughes, Icon Books, €14.99
