TEN GREAT SPORTS BOOKS

A friend of mine has never read a sports book. This list is intended to get him off on the right foot. Here are ten of the best, each on a different sport. Most can be bought used for under $10:

Golf in the Kingdom: Guy stops in Scotland on his way to India. Meets Scottish golf pro who shape-shifts, hits 300-yard drives, communes with the void. Goes home and founds the Esalen Institute. Some people think it's deep, others not. But it's funny and well-written, so worth the effort even if you don't achieve enlightenment the day you read it.

Beyond a Boundary: Can't improve on this reviewer: "to say 'the best cricket book ever written' is piffingly inadequate praise." It is also one of the best books ever written about the experience of the British Empire from the perspective of the colonized elites, and the love/hate relationship that emerged from that. Some light Marxism thrown in. Some view author CLR James as a key founder of postcolonialism.

Levels of the Game: A good effort from John McPhee, much better in my opinion than the sycophantic A Sense of Where You Are. This book is built around the Jimmy Connors / Arthur Ashe Wimbledon final. After losing in an upset Connors said he felt like he'd been beaten to death with a marshmallow.

Fast Company: Jon Bradshaw's book gives short biographies on six gambler/con-men of various kinds, including the legendary golf/pool/horseshoes hustler Titanic Thompson. Thompson may have been the best golfer in the world, but we'll never know, since there was more money to be made hustling than winning golf tournaments.

Death in the Afternoon: Ernest Hemingway's famous meditation on bullfighting. As animal torture sports go, I like bullfighting because the animal gets a clean shot.

The Natural: Bernard Malamud's existential novel of supernatural talent, dishonor, redemption, honor, duty, and pretty much everything else. Baseball's an American game, but Malamud's story, with its magical realism and tragic structure strikes me as having a more Latin sensibility. If you want the American version, see the movie, with Robert Redford and a happy ending. Honorable mention: Jim Bouton's Ball Four.

Masters of the Chessboard: In the 1920s, before computers and chess coaches, the game was still an open frontier. A generation of young players known as the "hypermoderns" challenged orthodox thinking, sometimes winning, sometimes losing spectacularly. Author Richard Reti (on the right in this picture, playing the U.S. champion Marshall) was one of the hypermoderns, and this book gives biographical sketches of his contemporaries as well as examples of their play.

The City Game: The late Pete Axthelm's seminal work on playground basketball, mixed in with reporting on the New York Knicks of the early 1970s. This is where I first heard of playground legend Earl "The Goat" Manigualt, later the subject of a movie (starring Don Cheadle). If you enjoy the subject, an excellent 1998 book called Pickup Artists is a worthy successor.

Eiger Dreams: I prefer this book of essays to Into Thin Air, Krakauer's pathos-drenched but monotonal masterpiece. Eiger Dreams has much greater scope, taking you from Switzerland to Alaska to the brutal 1986 K-2 season when 27 people summitted and 14 died. The writing is consistently strong throughout.

The Big Drop: The only anthology here, this is a series of pieces about big wave surfing. The writing is uneven and who knows which stories are true and which aren't (there are at least three "biggest wave" claims by different authors). Includes pieces by and about the late Mark Foo, and the greatest big wave surfer ever, Laird Hamilton.