An odd year for sports books. The World Cup failed to produce the usual bumper crop of literary meditations and we were forced to make do with some works of mixed merit ghosted on behalf of the English football team.
The Tour de France, which crashed in chaos this summer, was perhaps the most interesting sports event of the year and was marked by a timely re-print of Paul Kimmage's A Rough Ride (Yellow Jersey £8.99) and will surely merit further examination. Yet the great drugs in sport book remains to be written.
At home the market for books on Gaelic games appears to expand annually. The next welcome development will come when Irish sports books appear on the shelves without sponsors' logos eating up space on the front cover. The most severe disappointment of the year was Behind the White Ball (Random House, £16.99 stg). A stroll through the headlines and quotes which have attached themselves to Jimmy White over the years suggest that writing a substantial and interesting autobiography would have been a formality, as straightforward as potting a black ball hanging over the lip. It's all there, isn't it - booze, fags, cancer, gambling, big life and cold deaths.
Not so. Rosemary Kingsland and White have teamed up to produce an over-written patchwork of harmless anecdotes which plays to the market best represented by the man who shouts `Gow orn Jimmeee' every time White bends over the table at The Crucible.
No convincing reflection, no signs of growth or learning, no arc to the journey, just a few `larfs' and a collection of characters so sentimentally harmless they might have fallen from the leaves of a Damon Runyon novel.
Most surprising success is Addicted (Harper Collins, £20.40 stg) by Tony Adams. Its consistently high sales since it was released in the autumn look like making it the best selling football book since Fever Pitch (well done Arsenal!)
Ghostwriter Henry Winter has succeeded in painfully wringing the honesty out of Adams's image and pouring it all into this book. From the startling opening chapter onwards Adams has laid himself bare with an integrity that is excruciatingly painful to read at times.
There were many of us for whom Adam's quintessential Englishness made him a little bit of a joke. By stripping himself bollock-naked here, he emerges unselfconsciously as a hero.
The point of it all is that stories don't become stories until the central character makes a journey like Adams has. And sports biographies don't always have to be bland. Hopefully, in the wake of Addicted, public and publishers will begin asking for for a little more.
For a clearer understanding of what the social politics of the English dressing-room must have been like at the World Cup, you need only read Glenn Hoddle's World Cup Diary (Deutsch, £20.90 stg) soon after reading the Adams book.
Hoddle is self-obsessed and self-absorbed to the point where his vanity has become crippling. The book is long on self-justification, sprinkled with casual betrayals of players. Shamefully, it was written with the involvement of the FA's press director David Davies. There was a good story to be told here. A man familiar with self-doubt and genuine introspection could have told it skillfully. Instead, Hoddle choose to preen. He emerges as a cold man, remote from the pulse of the game and given to small cruelties. How his charges really see him will be the subject of more interesting books in the future.
The World Cup odyssey didn't produce the usual slew of books and certainly nothing as useful as Pete Davies's All Played Out from England's 1990 adventure. The nearest we have is Mark Palmer's Lost in France (Fourth Estate, £14.99 stg), a readable but lightweight trip through the summer. The difficulty with the book is that it never makes up its mind as to whether it is a fly on the wall account of England's World Cup or a mere travelogue. The best stuff revolves around the team and their relations with the press just before the competition when the squad is being pruned for the last time. We don't get to France until chapter seven and by then the book has become a fan's eye view of the competition.
For the heavy metal stats lover, The Complete Encyclopedia of Football, edited by Keir Radnedge (Carlton, £29.95 stg), is a huge volume which will become the definitive international soccer reference book and will serve as a comfortable seat for a small child if needed.
On the domestic front, in a thin year for quality, Dave Hannigan's The Garrison Game (Mainstream £12.99 stg) bucks the trend. Hannigan runs his finger along the modern developments in Irish soccer, explaining its appeal in anecdotal form. The book is fascinating and brimming with dispatches from off the beaten track - a nice chapter on journalist Bob Hennessy, time with Pat Dolan, an immersion into the world of Roy Keane. The best Irish soccer book in memory.
Boxing, usually a font of good words and fine reads, has had a thin year. Punching just below heavyweight and the best of the current stable is Nick Pitt's The Paddy and the Prince (Random House, £16 stg). The title is a little jarring for those not familiar with Brendan Ingle's unique style in ironing out race relations problems.
The book is basically a chronicle of the split foretold. Naseem Hamed, plucked from the streets of Sheffield's East End, grows to greatness under Ingle's canny tutelage, but with the smell of money filling his lungs he outgrows Brendan and becomes a little too big for the Wincobank gym in which he was reared. Ingle talks frankly about their relationship and the growth away from each other. It's an ultimately depressing tale and anyone who witnessed Hamed brushing off Ingle's grandfatherly caress in Atlantic City recently will know who will ultimately be more damaged by the split.
The Muhammad Ali industry continues apace. I'm a Little Special. A Muhammad Ali reader (Yellow Jersey, £16 stg), edited by Gerald Early, is a collection of pieces, some substantial, some flimsy, from four decades of journalism covering Ali's career. Some artifacts like two pieces written by Jackie Robinson on Ali are interesting merely for the fact of who wrote them.
Others tell a forgotten part of the tale. Jimmy Cannon, who had a sweet knockdown style as a journalist, detested Ali through the 1960s and the piece included here reminds us of just how widespread a phenomenon that antipathy was. As usual with these books there are quibbles about what gets left out (no Dudley Doust, Budd Schullberg, Jim Murray or Dave Anderson), but as a record of a boxing career which became a tidal wave it is a useful addition.
Victor Bockris's Muhammad Ali: In Fighter's Heaven is a quirky, lyrical book, written by a poet about a poet. Bockris (like half the world it sometimes seems) spent time with Ali in the run up to his fight with Foreman in Zaire. The book is a meditation on the man in his prime, more intimate and loving than other accounts of Ali during that period. The book doesn't set out to provide the big picture on Ali or discuss him as a social institution. It's just one man at the centre of a storm of his own creation.
For a study of the sociological impact of Ali, his shaping of time and place, readers must wait for the arrival on this side of the Atlantic of David Remnick's King of The World (Random House, $25), much the best sports book this reader got his mitts on in the past year. Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has taken the theme which Cannon approached from a different angle in his piece discussed above. Ali in the 1960s. Many people can claim to have been shaped by that turbulent decade, very few can claim to have shaped it. Remnick picks up the tale during the time of Patterson and Liston and spots Ali emerging from over the horizon, hollering. Gradually Ali moves centre stage. The genius of the book is in its re-creation of the ambience, its appreciation of a time when the heavyweight championship of the world had some innocence about it and when self-promoting patter like Ali's was novel and well done, not jarring to most people.
Poignantly, the book is framed by opening and closing pieces on Ali's current condition. Well done and sensitively written, they just about manage to avoid being exploitative.
From the fairways, Curt Sampson continues the form he displayed with his wonderful biography of Ben Hogan with a perceptive look at another southern institution in The Masters, Golf, Money and Power in Augusta, Georgia (Villard, £19.00), a timely look at the sometimes chilling backdrop to the world's greatest golf tournament which includes a riveting examination of the life and death of Clifford Roberts who still haunts the place. Sampson may not get accredited to another Masters, but it was worth it.
Quirkier by far is World Champions Golf (Assouline, £19.50), an odd mix of splendid photos and fractured essay pieces. The same people have produced similar books on basketball and boxing. For some reason they work even if the profiles are shallow and the design is a little eccentric.
On the racing front, John and Bob Kelly are back in the ring with Irish National Hunt Records (£5) to add to their invaluable flat racing tome. It is packed from post to post with the details of who won what, where and when.
Giving a Little Back by Barney Curley (Harper Collins, £15.99 stg) is a surprisingly engaging read from the former high roller who has broken the vow of silence which he took when he became a big-time gambler a couple of decades ago.
Impressive, too, is Travelling the Turf (Kensington West Productions, £17.99 stg) a sort of seduction into the pleasures of racing. Now in its 14th edition, the book sets itself out as a companion to the racecourses of Ireland and Britain. Lavishly illustrated, with travel and accommodation details, it is as much an invitation as anything else.
Whatever happened to showjumping? Michael Slavin's Showjumping Legends, Ireland 1868-1998 (Wolfhound, £20) sets itself out as a history as much as a sports book, following the growth of the sport through the booming 1970s and on into the less certain 1980s and 1990s. Given the quality of the research, a few more colour plates scattered through the book might have been worth a thought, as would more detail on the World Equestrian Games debacle which only merits a paragraph.
On the GAA front, Shooting from the Hip (Storm, Pat Spillane with Sean McGoldrick) has made quite an impact due not least to Spillane's rambunctious performance on The Late Late Show. Spillane can be irritating and his style (paying homage to himself early and often) can rankle a little, yet on the other hand he is a breath of fresh air, a welcome relief from the blushing `just happy to be here' style of GAA book. The book is spangled with splendid spots of hubris, but Spillane is entitled to same.
Sambo, All or Nothing (Wolfhound, £6.99) is a different sort of book, but seductive in a more understated way, answering amongst other things how the author, Antrim hurler Terence McNaughton, acquired his indelible nickname. A little more on life growing up with the Troubles would have been welcome, but what political content there is rivets the reader.
Brendan Hackett's book on the internal tools required for sporting glory, Success From Within (National Coaching and Training Centre, £12.99), is surprisingly straightforward, lavishly illustrated and an invaluable addition to a growing canon on the subject. Two photography books sneak under the tape this year. Nothing adorns a report quite like an action picture from Ray McManus or his Sportsfile photographers and for the second year running, Sportsfile have collected the best of the GAA season between two covers in A Season of Sundays 1998, a wonderful album of the best shots and the greatest moments of a remarkable GAA year.
What Ray McManus does for the action shot, Billy Stickland and Inpho have done for the feature shot. Hoping for Heroes is a collection of their best work over the past decade and includes some extraordinary studies of our finest sports people. Two reference books for the shelves also. Whitaker's Almanac (The Stationary Office, £14.99 stg) does a tremendous job of collating all the results and stats from international sport. There has been a gap in the market for a couple of years and while the design is perfunctory, the stats are comprehensive.
The same could be said of The Irish Sports Almanac (ArtCam, £8.50,) a welcome addition to the collection of any sports journalist or sports fan. Packed with a remarkable trove of records and statistics (1 million facts, the cover says), the almanac includes a directory of sports organisations and a who's who of Irish sport. It takes up residence in the top drawer today.
Motor sport books rarely throw up anything more interesting than fawning tomes on the overpaid drivers involved in the Formula One circus, but Against the Odds - Jordan's Drive to Win (Macmillan, £24.99 stg) breaks the mould. Forget the garish cover because Mauroce Hamilton's book (with outstanding photographs by Jon Nicholson) is a compelling account of a very difficult year for the Eddie Jordan-led team which eventually came right when Damon hill drove to victory in the Belgian Grand Prix at the end of August.
Finally, Best American Sportswriting (Houghton Mifflin, $13.00) is back again, edited this year by Bill Littlefield, and arriving in a welcome, thicker volume than in recent years. A fine piece on Tyson by David Remnick and a wonderful baseball piece on Brady Anderson by Tom Boswell are among the highlights. Suffice to say, there are no bad pieces.
