More than a game: how sport stars’ memoirs took over the bestseller lists

Sport is the new show business. Both front and back pages of newspapers here this week were given over to coverage of Roy Keane's autobiography The Second Half, while in Britain the cricketer Kevin Pietersen's revelations about the England team he once captained transfixed the public. Or the media, anyway.

Coming up over the next few weeks are Brian O'Driscoll's autobiography, the golfer Ian Poulter telling us what he really thinks about Tiger Woods and Colin Montgomerie – spoiler alert: it's not conciliatory – cricketer Sachin Tendulkar revealing all, the Kerry star Paul Galvin telling it his way, and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, Luis Suárez's autobiography.

Some of these books will be the biggest selling nonfiction titles of the year in some countries; all will be scrutinised by the media, as with the Keane and Pietersen books, for finger-pointing, name-calling, backstabbing and self-martyrdom.

Time was that if you wandered to the back of a bookshop, for the sports-biography section, you would be confronted by the fairly unexciting life story of the snooker player Terry Griffith, something by the golfer Greg Norman, or the baroque horror of the footballer Frank Worthington's One Hump or Two. ("It was never going to win the Booker prize," as one reviewer drily noted.) Even supposed bad boys such as the English cricketer Andrew Flintoff couldn't persuade many readers to hang around for chapter two.

But, as this week has shown, the sports autobiography is now the default window display for booksellers trying to catch the eye of passing trade. Forget about restricting Keane and O’Driscoll to the sports shelf: they’ll be in the bestsellers section.

It’s not just the newspaper-extracted gossipy delights of autobiographies that appeal to people whose only previous experience of a sports memoir was something to do with Italia ’90.

These just-released or about-to-be-released books are giving us Shakespearean levels of drama and intrigue, the page-turning capabilities of a Dan Brown, the subterfuge of a John le Carré and the type of confessional material that could be parlayed into an award-winning HBO series.

These days readers expect – and usually receive – not just a hit list of enemies to be eviscerated in the ghostwriter’s best prose but also, quite often, revelations of alcoholism, bulimia, gambling addiction or broken marriages.

Many talk of Andre Agassi's magnificent Open, from 2009, as the first purveyor of a new style of sport autobiography. You don't need to know the first thing about tennis to appreciate Open's bracing style, but nearer to home two Irish writers were decades ahead of the pack. Eamon Dunphy's Only a Game?, from 1979, and Paul Kimmage's Rough Ride, from 1990, set new literary standards for the sporting memoir.

It helps that Roy Keane and Brian O'Driscoll have working lives full of glorious achievement and were at the centre of dramas that mattered to the national psyche.

These sporting lives of agonies and ecstasies speak to us in a way that those of entertainment stars cannot. Which would you prefer: Russell Brand banging on about drugs or Roy Keane banging on about headbutting Peter Schmeichel on the 27th floor of a Hong Kong hotel after, as they say, drink had been taken?

At a more local level, Michael McLoughlin of Penguin Ireland points to the big commercial success of GAA memoirs. “These are people who still live in the same parish, who don’t drive a Porsche to the training ground but who sell in very large amounts,” he says.

With so much of what we read now PR-driven, agenda-promoting or tendentiously “spun” out of any relationship with reality, sport stars often have an authenticity that pop singers or film actors seem to lack.

Yet, at the highest level, PR has invaded the sporting arena too. Part of the commercial appeal of the sporting biography these days lies in the relative unavailability of major sporting stars. You might get 20 minutes to interview a top footballer, rugby player or golfer, but they’ll use 10 of those talking in a contractually obliged way about the new video game or sportswear that they’re helping to sell.

And which sport stars are going to bleed their souls for the sake of in-depth newspaper interviews when they can have their confessions eloquently and self-servingly edited over 80,000 words at €18.99 a hardback-sale pop?

With fiction proving difficult to shift, Bookseller magazine, in the UK, reports that the sport-literature market was worth a record £43 million in sales in Britain in 2013. That's the same year that Alex Ferguson's My Autobiography became the fastest-selling work of nonfiction since records began.

As Roy Keane, Brian O’Driscoll, Kevin Pietersen and Luis Suárez now know, in publishing, as in sport, timing is everything.

CHAPTER AND VERSE: FIVE GREAT SPORT BOOKS
Rough Ride, by Paul Kimmage The beginning of the end for the lie that was professional cycling. An enormously important book.

A Lot of Hard Yakka, by Simon Hughes You'll never view cricket the same way again.

Open, by Andre Agassi Wigs, Brooke Shields and crystal meth. Fear and loathing in Las Vegas and beyond.

The Game, by Ken Dryden The life of a professional ice hockey player made enthralling.

Only a Game? by Eamon Dunphy (edited by Peter Ball) The definitive insider's account of professional football.