The Sports Bookshelf

Just as Wimbledon has the capacity to make temporary tennis fans from spectators and television viewers who at most other times have no interest in the sport, so the Ryder Cup can stir the normally golf-averse to acquire at least a fleeting fascination with foursomes and fourballs, birdies and bogeys.  It has a special appeal for some players, too, enabling them to escape from the insular, isolated pursuit of glory as an individual to work with familiar rivals towards a common goal, develop camaraderie and experience the singularly uplifting joy of shared success. One who falls into that camp is Sam Torrance, who won 21 tournaments on the European Tour between 1976 and 1998 but will recall two moments in the Ryder Cup as the high points of his career. The first came at The Belfry in 1985 when his 15ft birdie putt at the 18th clinched Europe’s first victory over the United States, ending a run of 13 consecutive wins by the Americans (one shared) since the last outright succes...

As Promised Land, Anthony Clavane’s superlative history of Leeds United, continues to attract acclaim, the author has been engaged to pass on some of the skills of his profession at a sports writing course in Shropshire in November. Clavane, who writes about a range of sports for the Sunday Mirror , will share the tutor’s platform with fellow author Richard Beard at a week-long residential course in the splendid surroundings of The Hurst , the estate that was once the home of the playwright, John Osborne. From back-page reports to full-length books, the course will examine techniques for transforming a passion for sport into writing that engages and entertains a wide range of readers. In a series of workshops and tutorials, Clavane and Beard will explain how to bring people and events to life, find the connections between personal experience and the wider sporting world and turn the compelling narratives of sport into equally gripping stories. The course, which costs £595.00 ...

At last it’s over.  After 177 days, the longest English cricket season on record ended on Thursday, somewhat jarringly with a one-day international. There is a six-week pause now before the first pre-Ashes warm-up match.  For the players named for the tour this afternoon, the chance to cast aside the boots and consider a world beyond runs and wickets can seldom have felt more timely. Cricket is a well paid profession now, as it should be.  And with greater rewards come greater demands.  For the majority of England players, the schedule is tough but not unreasonable.  Yet there must be a small part of each of them that hankers after the more leisurely world of club cricket, the game that in  our imaginations is played in dappled sunlight on pretty village greens flanked by trestle tables draped in chequered cloths, heaving under the weight of sumptuous teas. Does that world really exist?  Here and there, perhaps.  But not in the picture that...

The market in self-centred memoirs penned by obsessive football fans has veered close to saturation point more than once since Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch unleashed the genre’s potential in 1992. Naturally, it takes a special writer to stand out from the crowd and for that reason a new work from Dave Roberts, author of The Bromley Boys , is worth noting. Roberts, a former advertising copywriter, won wide acclaim for managing to capture how it feels to support a less-than-successful non-League club in his account of Bromley FC’s desperate times in the Isthmian League of 1969-70. Remembering in admirable detail how football (plus life, the universe and everything, of course…) looked through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy, Roberts revealed a talent for self-deprecating humour that impressed reviewers for The Guardian , The Independent and When Saturday Comes among others and saw Roberts proudly cover-to-cover with such luminary fan-writers as Tim Parks and Harry Pearson on book shop...

Chris Brasher Chris Brasher’s influence on athletics was extraordinary. He was a pacesetter when Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, unexpectedly won an Olympic Gold in the 3,000-metres steeplechase in Melbourne in 1958 and was later instrumental in setting up the London Marathon.  Also a distinguished sports journalist and broadcaster, he was a complex and controversial character yet a man whose life story has never been properly told. Now that task has been taken on by John Bryant, former editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, who was a friend of Brasher and has a passionate interest in the history of running.  Bryant has plenty of his own memories to draw upon, but is appealing for help from others who may have known the former Observer sports editor, who died in 2003. Writing on the Sports Journalists Association website, Bryant says: I’d known Brasher from the 1960s, was a friend of his, and am now trying to make sense of his life, for whi...

It is a sad consequence of the effect of the recession on the book business that even great stories told by famous names might struggle to make it into print as publishers become increasingly anxious to avoid taking risks. The life of Garry Birtles, the carpet fitter who became a double European Cup winner with Nottingham Forest and then Manchester United’s most expensive player, is a terrific tale that has begged to be told -- but almost 20 years after his last professional game it might be hard to convince a commissioning editor worried about his margins to agree. Happily, publishing does not begin and end with the big London houses and the Garry Birtles story is now sitting on bookshop shelves thanks to a three-way collaboration that will, with luck, provide more evidence that, in the sports book business, small can be beautiful -- and, more to the point, profitable. My Magic Carpet Ride , just released by Reid Publishing , has seen the light of day after Birtles teamed up wi...

When batsman Mark Wagh recorded his thoughts in a diary of the 2008 English cricket season ( Pavilion to Crease... and Back ; Fairfield Books), it looked like the army of ex-players occupying Press Boxes around the country would be swelled by another recruit before much longer. Wagh’s honest and well-written account of a season with his county, Nottinghamshire, was spoken of in the same breath as previously acclaimed work by Jonathan Agnew, Ed Smith and Simon Hughes, all of whom have gone on to establish careers in the media or, in the case of Smith, write a number of books. But when, after scoring nearly 12,000 first-class runs, Wagh puts his bat away for good next summer it will be for a career in the law rather than journalism. “I did think about journalism because I do enjoy writing,” Wagh said. “But while I enjoy playing cricket I’m not a great watcher and I wondered if it might be a bit of a lonely existence, with just a laptop for company a lot of the time. “I also lo...