The five best of the year

2004 Review: Keith Duggan picks his top sports books of 2003 and, below, offers his thoughts on a selection of the year's tomes also worth reading

Who's Your Caddy? Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf. By Rick Reilly (Doubleday, €15.99)

George Plimpton invented the trick of sports scribbler masquerading as sports star. In the year of his death, it is appropriate that the idea has been subverted by his natural successor as clown prince, Rick Reilly. Here, he doesn't play the hero but the hero's valet.

The Sports Illustrated columnist and wag used his clout to get up close and personal with some of golf's best known figures. He persuaded players like David Duval and John Daly to allow him to tail them for actual PGA events as caddie. Daly habitually insults his novice help for an entire week that is laden with the golfer's slightly noxious brand of one-liners. Asked how he hits the ball so far, Daly remarked: "Well, you gotta have a lot of ex-wives. I just think of 'em and hit it."

Reilly also spends time on the course with Donald Trump, blind golfer Bob Martin and, for some reason, Bob Newhart. Reilly delights in sending himself up as the Everyman caught in a thankless situation and never passes up an opportunity for a wise-crack but at heart he is a shrewd and deeply ambitious sports writer with a lot of influence. So there is always the suspicion at the heart of this book that the big boys are just indulging one of the heavy hitters of the American print game.

The Best American Sports Writing 2003. Edited by Buzz Bissinger (Mariner Books, €13.99)

An annual publication that rarely disappoints, this is a selection of essays and stories selected from a diverse range of magazines and periodicals. Containing both long and short pieces, it features the ritzy names that regularly fill the back pages of the US newspapers and ordinary people whose experiences enhanced the sport in which they are involved.

Elizabeth Gilbert profiles a marathon runner with a serious physical disability, Terry Pluto writes on a young boy with autism who acts as water boy for his local football team. Against that, there are in-depth essays on baseball slugger Barry Bonds and basketball icon Shaquille O'Neal.

The bad news is the book is continually unavailable in Irish bookshops but is easily secured through amazon.com or the English haven www.sportspages.co.uk Ph:00442072409604.

Broken Dreams - Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football. By Tom Bower (Pocketbooks, €10.75)

Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, this is a sombre and ultimately unforgiving investigation into the movers and shakers who operate in the twilight of English soccer's big money deals. Among those under scrutiny are George Graham, Harry Redknapp and Terry Venables. Forensically researched, the various misdeeds and pernicious deals are presented with sober clarity by the author, who presents a sport riddled with corrupt forces.

It is an indictment that English soccer should find embarrassing. The problem is, however, because English soccer is an environment beset by troubles much more grievous than financial greed and gross ineptitude, it is hard to be surprised and even harder to be moved towards indignation by the revelations here. But the rigid note of quiet disdain that Bower holds throughout makes for uncomfortable reading at times.

Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo. By Tom Humphries (Townhouse, €11.99)

The chief sports feature writer with this newspaper sketches a year spent chasing big-time sport. Misadventures on the pure white slopes of Salt Lake City, tears and heartbreak out in Saipan and redemption back in the gentler climes of Ireland's green fields, this is a book that should come equipped with a complimentary box of valium.

Funny and bravely honest, the book highlights the gulf that has opened up between those who dominate sport at the top level and those who attempt to write about it.

Month after month, The Irish Times man presents himself as stumbling into one bewildering sports universe after another, all the while vainly trying to cling on to the last vestiges of his dignity.

It is his gift or folly to still care and obsess about sport despite its constant spurning of his overtures.

The consequences are obvious in many luminous passages, particularly those pertaining to Roy Keane, the stadium farce and the welcome slap-in-the-face effect of returning from the front to see children playing sport for fun.

Woody and Nord. By Gareth Southgate and Andy Woodman (Michael Joseph, €25.00)

Strangely compelling first-person account of the steadfast friendship between former England international Gareth Southgate and journeyman goalkeeper Andy Woodman.

Written in conjunction with Irish sports journalist David Walsh, the friends chart their lives from carefree apprentices at Crystal Palace to family men looking at the sunset of their soccer lives.

Southgate, always notably bright and dignified, went on to reach the highest levels of the game while Woodman scraped his way through the lower leagues. But they stayed tight.

This reads like 300 pages of dialogue but for some reason it works, mainly because both men are totally honest and humorous in their self-assessment. Although the perception among their peers is that Woodman "did well" to hang on to Southgate as a buddy, it seems Southgate is the one who needed Woodman's reassurance more, particularly as his England career goes into decline under Sven-Goran Eriksson.

It is a book that young Premiership players, on signing their first contract, should be made read.

Late on, Woodman tells of the pair of them heading to a London civic park with Woodman's son.

"Freddie said he was David Beckham, I was David Seaman and Gareth was allowed be Gareth. Within ten minutes, he was covered in mud as he and Freddie tried to score goals against me. A few kids recognised Gareth and stood there watching, amazed that an England player should play so long with a five-year-old."