Nostalgia sells as old stars and ancient fields get treatment

Browsing the year's offerings, Keith Dugganfinds something to appeal to most tastes

It was no great surprise that the winner of this year's William Hill sports book of the year award was Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (Pimlico, £8.99, €13.50). Praised by boxing aficionado Joyce Carol Oates as the definitive biography of the famous heavyweight champion who drew the wrath of white America by licking every boxer he stepped into the ring with and then boldly and flamboyantly flaunted his race and colour in the genteel establishments, Geoffrey C Ward's book was not only immaculately researched, it transports the reader back to those years when sporting heroes seemed more brave and colourful and interesting.

When Jeff Willard finally agreed to cross "the colour line" it was to end White America's anger at the parade Johnson was making. Willard's return from retirement was inglorious and as he was soundly defeated in Reno in 1910, he had to endure Johnson's taunts - "Come on now, Mr Jeff, let me see something" - as well as the punishing beating.

Ward contends that Johnson's victory was the most significant and celebratory moment for Black Americans since emancipation almost half a century earlier and notes that it precipitated the most inflammatory race riots until Martin Luther King was assassinated 58 years later.

Defying social convention during the Jim Crow laws made Johnson a figure of hate: the governor of New York described his second marriage to a White woman as "a blot on civilisation".

Johnson was loud and flash and contrary and persevered with a life of rubbing elite American noses in it through eventual defeat and prison before dying in a car crash in 1946.

Ward, a distinguished biographer, presents a riveting and cinematic account of a boxing pioneer whose allure remains strong and who was referred to by the Ali corner man Bundini Brown as "the ghost in the house".

The New York historian came up against hefty competition on this year's shortlist. Guy Walters's Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream (John Murray £20, €30) offers another retrospective, accounting for the controversial build-up to the 1936 games and how the American IOC representative Avery Brundage was instrumental in quietening those few voices of conscience who spoke out in the mid-1930s.

Predictably, most of the competing athletes were too myopic and self-absorbed to worry about the reports of what was happening in Germany during that time, and the book suggests the Führer was more in thrall to the performances of the Nordic athletes than he was bothered by the iconic victories of Jesse Owens.

Also on the William Hill shortlist was Matt Rendell's bleak and brilliant study of one of the finest professional cyclists of the modern era. The Death of Marco Pantani: A Biography (Weidenfeld and Nicholson £22.90, €34.50) is a detailed and painful examination of the rise of a shy and complex Italian boy from a normal childhood to stardom through Europe's great road races, where he quickly established himself as an incomparable stylist and a winner.

Pantani could be both gregarious and reclusive, and his well-being rapidly deteriorated after he was inevitably caught up in the substance-abuse scandals that engulfed big-time cycling in the late 1990s, leading to the agonising account of his journey into progressive mental illness and eventual death by suicide in a hotel bedroom.

Rendell, so obviously smitten by Pantani's wonderfully brave and reckless cycling style, does not shrink from the strong evidence that the cyclist was using chemicals, but the point of the book is not his guilt or innocence but why and how such a publicly feted and loved man could end up so alone in a Rimini hotel room just a couple of years after his great triumphs.

As of November, Rendell's book had sold just 7,000 copies. Weidenfeld's other William Hill contender was Preferred Lies: A Journey through Scottish Golf (Bantam £14.99, €22.50), by Andrew Grieg, which sold just over 5,000 copies. Small beer in comparison to the kind of sales the publishing houses were hoping to attract with biographies of the Premiership's brightest and best.

The deal Harper Sport negotiated with Manchester United and England boy wonder Wayne Rooney, which promises another four tomes, does not bode well. The first instalment, My Story so Far (£22.95, €34.50), was written in collaboration with the respected football writer Hunter Davies and begins with the meek and unpromising revelation: "I was nearly called Adrian." But that perfectly humdrum little nugget is also true to the reality of young Wayne's boyhood, which was absolutely normal, relatively happy and completely unremarkable except for his blinding talent with a football.

The question of Rooney's Irish blood is dealt with relatively early on. Informed in the schoolyard that his surname was Irish, young Wayne ran home to ask his dad, "Are we Irish?"

"I don't know," Rooney senior said indifferently. And that was that. Apparently someone is working on the family tree, which might be ready for the fifth book.

It might have been different if England had won the World Cup but they did not and therefore details such as the first film Wayne and Colleen went to see - The Spy Who Shagged Me - are not necessarily all that enticing.

By October, the Rooney book had sold 37,000 copies. Rio: My Story by Rio Ferdinand attracted just 7,600 punters while My Defence by Ashley Cole scraped past the 3,000 mark, all serious disappointments for publishers who secured the England boys' rights with hefty advances.

The problem is one the publishers blithely overlooked but the reading public did not.

Most modern football stars appear to lead monumentally guarded and boring lives. The misadventures of George Best made for great anecdotes in a less salacious age but the laughs dried up once the full extent of Best's alcoholism became clear.

In any event, there is no contemporary football figure to compare with Best for wit and imagination and a talent for mischief-making. Today's terrace heroes are safe, pampered and suspicious young men living under constant scrutiny. Even if they wanted to get up to the kind of high jinks for which Best was famous, they could not.

If you want a biography that hits on the wild life, best plump for John Daly: My Life in and out of the Rough (HarperCollins €28.50), a jaw-dropping account of the big man's talent for self-destruction. His gambling stories are as spectacular as his legendary driving ability: he celebrated one of his biggest wins of recent years, when he netted $750,000, by going to Las Vegas and blowing $1.65 million. In five hours flat.

Not that there is an ounce of self-pity: when he moaned to his pal Fuzzy Zoeller one night, Fuzzy drove him to a graveyard and assured him he was better off than the folks in there.

Of course, it was the inaugural winner of the William Hill Irish sports book of the year, Back from the Brink by Paul McGrath (Random House, £18.99. €28.50), that demonstrated the potential power of an honest story plainly told. McGrath's early life was unbearably bleak and is an important story of social and familial alienation that elevates it above the realm of the ordinary sports biography. But the most obvious difference is that McGrath and his collaborator, Vincent Hogan, clearly put their hearts and minds into the project, and therefore it feels honest and genuine, unlike so many of the dismal football biographies that are churned out.

The McGrath book was outstanding in a reasonably strong year for Irish-themed books. The year 2006 will go down in posterity as marking the end of the road for the ramshackle and evocative Lansdowne Road. Edward Newman's book Lansdowne through the Years (Hodder Headline, €24.95) is a beautifully produced hardback tribute to the old place, with personal reflections from enduring names and some great photographs.

The year was also a milestone for the effervescent Ronnie Delaney, whose immortal run to gold in the 1,500-metre final at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics became a 50-year memory.

Staying the Distance (O'Brien Press, 25.95) is another fine-looking book, with a remarkable collage of the global sports magazines that used Delaney as a cover star in the late 1950s. His emergence from athletics meetings in south Dublin to the slightly awe-inspiring environment of Villanova University is fascinating and the details of his 40-race winning streak a salient reminder of the proud Irish tradition in the middle distances.

Gambling is an Irish tradition of a different time and one of the more unusual books of the year is Taken for a Ride (Gill & Macmillan, 12.99), Francis PM Hyland's authoritative and highly entertaining journey through the great betting coups and scandals that have punctuated Irish racing through the years.

The most offbeat sports book of the year must be Paddy on the Hardwood (University of New Mexico, 35.95), a confessional account of the season an American basketball coach spent in the company of the Tralee Tigers. Rus Bradburd's decision to coach Tralee was partly born of a midlife crisis, partly out of an idealistic desire to immerse himself in the Ireland of literature and folk music and partly for the hell of it.

Stunned by the almost invisible nature of Irish basketball and charmed and disarmed by several of its leading characters, Bradburd is affectionate and mocking in tone and nails the underlying lunacy of the Irish hoops game and the random characters that ghost it.

In one hilarious section, he receives a phone call from a would-be ball player living in north Donegal who promises to "shoot good the three" On condition the Tigers secure "job for brother".

As it turns out, the sharpshooter smokes like a fiend and almost gets a job not as the team's designated spot shooter but as the club mascot, until Bradburd decides it wouldn't look good to have a Tony the Tiger lighting up in the fourth quarter.

The book concerns the 2002/2003 season but the presence of Kieran Donaghy, who tore up the form book in this year's All-Ireland football championship, offers an intriguing insight into what the footballer of the year used to do before he was famous.

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