5 Sports Books That Deserve Big Cheers

By Sean Gregory

PERFECT ONCE REMOVED

PHILLIP HOOSE

It is1956, and Hoose is the new kid in his Indiana town, a klutzy, nearsighted third-grader who wears trousers a bit too high. Then his parents deliver the news "on the order of a cure for polio": Don Larsen--a New York Yankee!--is his cousin once removed. The kid and the star trade letters, they meet, and Hoose gains courage and acceptance. When Larsen throws his iconic perfect game in the World Series that October, "even a few girls came over" to the boy's desk. Hoose reconnects with the player 50 years later, expecting to find a "half-ghost." Instead, Larsen's joie de vivre inspires both author and reader.

FORTY MILLION DOLLAR SLAVES

WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Don't equate the fat contracts of today's African-American athletes with power, Rhoden argues in this provocative book. The white owners and agents are still calling most of the shots. Rhoden blames today's black athletes for failing to acquire real control and Michael Jordan for approaching black causes "with an apathy that borders on treason." The solution? Rhoden proposes an intersport, black-athlete trade association. That, he says, would really put the ball in the black players' hands.

MOVING THE CHAINS

CHARLES P. PIERCE

After a seesaw career at the University of Michigan, Tom Brady joined the New England Patriots as a fourth-string quarterback in 2000. He practiced with a group of rookies, "many of whom already had one foot in a liquor distributorship back home," writes Pierce in this bright biography. But soon Brady was guiding an unlikely dynasty, winning three Super Bowls for a downtrodden franchise. Pierce traces the sources of Brady's trademark selflessness, from growing up with three elder sisters to his struggles at Michigan. "If you choose to put yourself apart," Brady says, "you know, play tennis."

DRIVING WITH THE DEVIL

NEAL THOMPSON

With clean-cut sponsors like Tide, the U.S. Army and Nextel fueling NASCAR's multibillion-dollar engine, stock-car racing's seedy past has been buried beneath the track. Thompson exhumes the sport's Prohibition-era roots in this colorful, meticulously detailed history. Painting NASCAR as "the accidental sport of Southern moonshiners," he recounts wildly entertaining stories of how late-1930s racing pioneers like Lloyd Seay, who was later murdered by his cousin, and "Reckless" Roy Hall, a jailbird, honed their craft during bootlegging runs, dodging the law on dusty Georgia back roads.

THE MAN WATCHING

TIM CROTHERS

Quick--Name the coach who has built the greatest dynasty in college-sports history. Unless you guessed Anson Dorrance, you're wrong. Dorrance's University of North Carolina women's soccer team has won 18 of the 25 national championships in collegiate history. (Mia Hamm is its most notable alum.) Crothers spent four all-access years with Dorrance and his players for this rich biography and tells the tale of an imperfect man who has shaped a near perfect program. Dorrance is at once a master motivator who writes touching letters to his players and invests himself in all aspects of their lives and a man described by former players and opposing coaches as "arrogant," "cruel" and even "evil." Crothers reaches a more benign conclusion, chalking up the harsh words to typical player-coach tensions and praising Dorrance for shaping an institution that has lifted women's sports.