There is a picture in Hell Razor - The Autobiography of Neil Ruddock (Collins Willow, £18.99) that for some reason lingers in the mind. It features a number of former Spurs players - Paul Walsh of the dubious hair extensions is in there and Terry Fenwick, stooge in the immortal film of Maradona's goal against England, is smiling out at us and of course Razor himself, our hero and narrator, strikes a commanding pose.
They are all in geezer mode, tanned and tight-denimed, and are each holding what appear to be tickets against their foreheads. They all seem to be having a fine time and the accompanying caption assures us that this state of high hilarity was the norm, that they were in fact, a crazy, crazy bunch. This might well have been the case, but what struck me about the photo was not so much the mirth as the realisation that I had forgotten these "athletes" had ever existed. Razor's magnus opus - his hopes and anecdotes and philosophies, garishly jacketed and edited to a manageable 200 or so pages, served as a reminder of how easily and totally terrace heroes can disappear from view. Not all that long ago, I briefly rooted for the Razor during his defensive days - another photo captures him in the ill-fated cream suits that Liverpool wore for the 1995 FA Cup final. Razor seems unabashedly pleased to be associated with that particular Merseyside debacle.
I nearly purchased Hell Razor out of sentimentality, so forlorn and lost did it look among the ocean of sports manuals and life stories and struggling seasons and lovingly crafted accounts of sporting feats that are all but forgotten by everyone except those who carried them out.
The Razor tome helps to confirm one of the chief grumbles of everyone who likes to read the odd book about sport (and his book is very, very odd). There are simply too many sports books on the market. Some sort of vetting or scouting system needs to be implemented, particularly of those in the English soccer oeuvre.
It now seems that a soccer apprenticeship is less a path into the bright lights of professional sport than a slide towards the murky underworld of autobiographical letters. Does the world really need Paulo Di Canio - The Autobiography? And precisely who are the people that spend their evenings studying the worldview of Jim Smith of Derby dugout fame. Smith's story can't be a major money-spinner, so what is the motivation? The only legacy of these fleet-footed scribes is one that reinforces the jaundiced perception that sports-writing, sports literature, is both lamentable and laughable, depending on your standpoint.
When you hit the wall of dross in most sports sections, it is hard to argue otherwise. But if you come armed with a shovel, it is possible to dig through the pulp and brush down stories worth telling.
Although this was not a particularly distinguished year, it did offer its share of gems. One of the most notable achievements was the salvation of the much-maligned soccer biography in the form of Full-Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino, as told to Paul Kimmage (Simon and Schuster, £9.99).
It is a radical departure from the typically bland landscape of most soccer memoirs and deals with raw honesty about Cascarino's turbulent private life, as well as his roller-coaster career as a journeyman centre forward. It is a tough book in the sense that Big Cas more or less sacrifices the loveable rascal image that underpinned his days as an Irish player.
There is a lot of the trademark humour - a passage recounting how Glen Hoddle ran a skills exercise to demonstrate his own superiority stands out. But it also covers the selfishness, the near narcissism, that clouds the judgement of so many professional sports people and at times in this story, Big Cas is portrayed in less than flattering light. A brave, sometimes discomforting book.
Among the other notable biographies of the year is Obsessed (Headline, £22.99), concerning the life story of Richard Dunwoody, who attained cult status in the racing world in 1986 when he rode West Tip to the National at the age of 22. Jockeys are an interesting breed anyway; driven, often vain, gutsy and, of course, astonishingly small. Dunwoody's candour, combined with David Walsh's great talent for structuring a good story, make this a must for race fans but its appeal stretches well beyond the parameters of the course. The most commercially successful of the cross-channel books has been the pictorial offering from the ubiquitous Mr Posh in David Beckham - My World (Hodder and Stoughton, £21.00). After a few hurriedly printed observations of life as a United star, the Spice Girls and fame, the work gets round to its main aim; capturing the essence of Beckham through the lens. So we get Beckham as husband, homeboy, footballer, boxroom rebel, public icon. Unashamed and highly profitable navel gazing.
If anti-glamour is your own particular nicotine, then The Eye of the Hurricane - the Alex Higgins Story (Mainstream, £19.99) by John Hennessey could be of interest. It could not be described as the most cheerful of Christmas gifts. Higgins' downfall has been one of the saddest and dispiriting sporting downturns of the last decade. The fallen hero is one of the most reliable and compelling motifs in sports-writing and while Higgins' self-destruction and deterioration is poignant, it is doubtful that this will become the definitive work on his life.
Of a more uplifting nature is Mark Byrne's spirited account of dealing with cancer, an illness that cut short his athletic career in I kicked the Devil in the Shins (On the Edge Books, £8.99). The Irish international explains the process of coping with the illness against the backdrop of his sporting feats for Ireland and while on scholarship in the States.
Most of the year's domestic books deal with GAA-related topics. Despite the fact that Gaelic games dominates the landscape so thoroughly, capturing the good stories and great characters in book form has proven difficult. Perhaps it is due to the fact the GAA community is so close it is virtually claustrophobic and those involved are reluctant to speak in depth, either about themselves or those around them. Occasionally, GAA books such as Breandan O hEithir's Over the Bar and Green Fields by Tom Humphries got to the heart of their subject matter. But such triumphs are rare.
It is a pity GAA folk aren't more receptive towards on-the-record discourse. The coverage of domestic sports remains staggeringly positive and that so few good stories get beyond the bar stool is the association's loss.
Still, of the books published this year, To Hell and Back - The Inside Story of the Clare Hurling Revival (Blackwater, £9.99), by Mike McNamara with Cian Murphy, offers a welcome perspective on one of the greatest stories in the history of the GAA. McNamara, the man who masterminded the famously torturous Clare training sessions in Crusheen, relives everything from the glory days of 1995 to the infamous summer months of 1998. We will wait a long time before we encounter a team and management as charismatic and approachable as the Clare bunch and this account will be of interest to anyone who took pleasure in their many Sundays of splendour.
One of the great survivors in Gaelic football is chronicled in Mick O'Dwyer, Manager of the Millennium (Leinster Leader, £9.95) by Owen McCrohan. Starting with the summer All-Ireland semi-final loss to Galway, the book courses through his management years in Kildare and his playing and managing days in Kerry, raising a few chuckles along the way. Those who have attempted to pin O'Dwyer down for interview can but marvel that McCrohan succeeded in getting the wily old fox to sit down long enough to record the material for this work. An accomplishment in itself.
A History of Gaelic football (Gill and MacMillan, price not available) by Jack Mahon is a fond journey through the great tales and events of the ages and is bound to strike a chord with GAA fans in almost all counties. The most off-beat GAA book of the year has to be Flashbacks - A half-century of Cork Hurling (Collins Press, £15.00) by Pat Nolan. Part tribute to Cork hurling, part pop anthology, it has the potential to interest everyone from John Fenton to John Peel.
For instance, many people might remember Galway beating Limerick in the All-Ireland semi-final replay of 1981, but who could recall that at the same time, budding chanteuse Aneka was about to take the number one spot with Japanese Boy?
And to learn that Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights was knocked off the top spot by Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs is to despair for the world. A unique and oddly fascinating contribution to the GAA canon.
Given that this was Olympic year, the athletics return was fairly light. Andrew Jennings, who has successfully formed a one-man crusade against the anomalies of the International Olympic Committee, marked the Sydney year with his publication of The Great Olympic Swindle (Simon and Schuster, £11.95). Jennings offers bountiful evidence that the IOC is rife with scandal and bribes, that it is in total conflict with its stated ethos and, in terms of research, is a brave and formidable work.
The only flaw is the tone; such is his contempt for his subjects, he reports their shortfalls in scathingly off-hand fashion that somehow detracts from the immense work he put in to establishing the facts. Still, he has given voice to the many people steamrolled by the great Olympic movement and it provides an invaluable asterisk to what has been, for the IOC, a PR year of Olympian triumph.
Sonia O'Sullivan was the one bright story of the Irish Olympic effort and her ascent towards 5,000 metre silver is beautifully captured in Running to Stand Still (Arklife, £14.99). It is essentially a pictorial tribute and Patrick Bolger's spare and evocative stills are stories within themselves. The text is provided by Tom Humphries, who has written about O'Sullivan for most of the last decade and spent time in her camp during the September games. It is a clear and impeccably produced tribute to the most heartening Irish sports story for many years.
The fairways generally inspire truckfulls of glossy books eulogising this green or that hole or the other golfer, but, this year, offerings are fairly thin on the ground. Possibly all the golf writers have been left spellbound by Tiger Woods. However, among the new and notable are The British Open: A History of Golf's Greatest Championship (Contemporary Books, price not available) by Francis Murray and Gary Player, a detailed and ambitious account of the revered tournament, complete with facts and figures. On the home front, The Golfer's Guide to Ireland (Travel, £9.99) by Dermot Gilleece offers an insightful description of this country's myriad courses.
The year's big rugby work comes from Stephen Jones. Midnight Rugby: Triumph and Shambles in the Professional era (Headline, £23.75) is a title that requires little elaboration. It covers the question which still runs hot in clubhouses all over the world: has rugby union improved with money or should we pine for the glory days of amateurism, when Garth Chilcott used to celebrate a Five Nations win by downing a bottle of aftershave?
When it comes down to it, the year's really major feats of sportswriting originate from the United States. This is inevitable; sportswriting is perceived as genuinely important there, and there is such a vast canvas that every year sees the emergence of a few works of really great quality. Nick Tosche's Night Train (Hamish Hamilton, £23.05) is a riveting and razoredged biography of the dark, unfathomable life of Sonny Liston. There is little revisionism here; Tosche writes in tough-guy, machine-gun prose that presents Liston's violent streaks and addictions and surliness in brutally clear fashion.
But he does offer a more rounded picture, with snippets of the boxer's great line in self-deprecatory humour, of his frustration at never being "loved" as a champion. A massive work, non-boxing fans might find his trawl through the fight corruption of the 1950s hard going, but his chronicle of Liston's rise and fall is unforgettable. The most distinguished work of 2000, though, is Joe Di Maggio: The Hero's Life (Simon and Schuster, £23.00) by Richard Ben Cramer. Di Maggio has been one of the most popular sources of American sports essays for the last 40 years, with his reclusiveness heightening his appeal.
Di Maggio lifted the torch ignited by Babe Ruth, flew through storms after attending the Babe's funeral so he could line out later for the Yankees in Washington and became the great lion, the god, of the baseball diamond. Along with his God-given talent, contends Cramer, the Di Maggio myth was created by the "hero machine".
Terrified of saying something wrong, the player realised that the New York print columnists, stars in their own right, would all but say the perfect thing for him. Silence became Joe's great eloquence. While not sentimental in tone, The Hero's Life is part elegy, part expose of the 1950s and 1960s America that seemed to revolve around the legendary Toots Shor's bar.
The Hero's Life is not so much the unmasking of an individual as the deconstruction of an entire era much cherished by Americans. The telling of Di Maggio's later years is particularly captivating - there is an almost comical chapter about the way Di Maggio, out at a game in Candlestick Park, dealt with the San Francisco earthquake. But his gradual estrangement from so many of his friends and family makes for pitiful reading and the gradual manipulation of his estate by a Florida law-firm is shocking.
The biography is due out here early next year and is certain to join the list of sports classics.
The Best American Sports Writing 2000 (Houghton and Mifflin, £11.50), a series now in its 10th year, never fails to reveal a few classic essays. Extreme sports feature heavily (and disappointingly) in this year's collection, but as ever, there are a few stories that stay with you. The Di Maggio name features prominently here also in Joe Di Maggio would appreciate it very much if you left him the hell alone, Robbie Huber's account of the desperate life of the legend's son Joey, who died of an overdose months after the Jolter passed away. Maintaining the family theme, Alision Glock spends time with Robbie Kneivel, son of 1970s daredevil Eval and Running Like Hell by Mike Finkel touches upon the frankly insane world of extreme running.
For those seeking the road less travelled, John Duncan's In the Red Corner - A journey into Cuban Boxing (Yellow Jersey Press, £15.60) details the author's decision to quit his job as sports news correspondent in the Guardian so he could head to Cuba to arrange a heavyweight clash between Mike Tyson and Felix Savon. Needless to say he failed, but he got this book out of his trip and, apparently, his job back. Sportscape (Phaidon, £37.50) is a massive and immaculate collection of the great sporting images of the century, or at least those snapped by the Allsport and Hulton Archive agencies. The idea is to illustrate how sports photography developed throughout the decades. As a result, some of the chosen shots, though technically flawless, are not so visually captivating. Some of the all-time classics are there - Ali leering over the fallen Liston in Maine, Michael Johnson's iconic golden shoe, Maradona throwing no less than six Belgian players into confusion and disarray. But it would be nice to hear, if possible, about how the photographers came to take the shot. And no action shot of Michael Jordan?
A Season of Sundays 2000 (Sportsfile, price not available) is the fourth consecutive portrayal of the GAA season as captured through the lenses of Ray McManus and his team. With a selection of stunning action shot and off-beat colour stills - the very first photograph, featuring the scoreboard at St Mary's in Ardee, is a story in itself - the collection captures the best of the home sports.
Finally, Steven Davison of Pacemaker Press International has put together a collection of his wonderful photographs of the late Joey Dunlop in Joey Dunlop - King of the Roads (O'Brien Press, £16.99). Given Dunlop's tragic death on July 2nd last, the photos carry a certain grim mystique now, but they do provide an insight into the folksy underworld of road racing. Dunlop was a great photographic subject and Davison was well acquainted with him and it tells. The race photos are stunning in themselves, but the personality-based portraits - of Dunlop smoking or draining a cup of tea - stand alone.
In his text, Davison tells a great story of Dunlop and his brother Robert ferrying their bikes across to the Isle of Man in 1985. They used a small fishing boat which got swamped in heavy waters. Legend has it that Joey was cooking lamb chops and Robert asked him if he had enough salt on the pan even as a massive wave crashed through the cabin.
"I think there's enough now," replied the man of few words.
The best yarns are always the simple ones.
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