John Gaustad, who died in June, argued that “the best sports books are about life itself, as much as sport”. The range, depth and ambition of the books published in 2016 prove his point. The judges for Gaustad’s creation, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, did him proud with a winner so leftfield – William Finnegan’s exquisitely observed surfing memoir Barbarian Days (Corsair) – that even its author questioned its eligibility. But more mainstream works also show sport illuminating life.
Jonathan Wilson’s Angels With Dirty Faces (Orion) offers a perceptive, wide-ranging history of Argentina seen through the prism of football. Messi, Maradona, Boca Juniors and the 1978 World Cup have their expected places, but so too do Juan and Evita Perón, the Malvinas and refrigerated beef in explaining a nation so singular that economist Simon Kuznets divided countries into “developed, undeveloped, Japan, and Argentina”. Similarly, academic Alan McDougall’s The People’s Game (Cambridge) uses football to examine life, and to explore the limits of authoritarian state power, in the little-lamented German Democratic Republic.
Australian writer Gideon Haigh’s Stroke of Genius (Simon & Schuster) brings a virtuoso’s breadth of reference and perception to a famous photograph of cricketer Victor Trumper. His book explores broad themes, ranging from aesthetics and the business of commercial photography to the lives of Trumper and photographer George Beldam, to Australia’s cricket and its wider history.
In June, the UK voted to leave the European Union, and England, less willingly, left the European football championships. Fine books help explain both. Rory Smith’s Mister (Simon & Schuster) casts a fresh long-term perspective on footballing insularity, showing how British coaches helped bring the game to the world but found themselves and their insights forgotten or ignored at home. Anthony Clavane’s compelling A Yorkshire Tragedy (Riverrun) spotlights both the decline of the county’s sports teams and its many “leave” votes in detailing the destruction of once-thriving industrial communities.
Yorkshire at least still manufactures good history. John Dewhirst’s Life at the Top and Room at the Top (Bantamspast) are well-researched accounts of earlier, happier sporting times in Bradford, while Leeds rugby league memories feature in Bev Risman’s highly readable memoir of a life across two codes Both Sides of the Fence (Scratching Shed). Elsewhere, Spurs followers were similarly well served by Martin Cloake and Alan Fisher’s A People’s History of Tottenham Hotspur (Pitch), a splendid chronicle of the club’s fans, and an evocation of Spurs’s greatest years in Cliff Jones’s It’s a Wonderful Life (Vision Sports).
It was not entirely a year of British footballing failure. Wales’s joyously unexpected progress to the Euro semi-finals will be comprehensible to anyone who reads Chris Wathan’s Together Stronger (St David’s), while the 50th anniversary of England’s World Cup win inspired Peter Chapman’s Out of Time (Wisden). His memoir of a postwar Islington childhood, goalkeeping for Leyton Orient juniors, and turning 18 in 1966 – with numerous rites of passage – is vivid, acute and affectionate while evading the trap of sentimentality.
More British historical figures in Christopher McGrath’s Mr Darley’s Arabian (John Murray), a picaresque chronicle of horse racing whose ingenious storytelling via bloodlines gives both the pleasure of a chapter titled “A Groom With a View” and offers the alarming fact that every British thoroughbred is traceable back to Aleppo.
If some books explain the world, others hope – and deserve – to change it. Guardian writer Anna Kessel’s Eat Sweat Play (Macmillan) indicts the social and cultural forces that deny women access to sport. It is personal, passionate and polemical, drawing on her own story and the experiences of others – from sporting enthusiasts to Olympic medallists – to reveal the true “killjoys”. They are not, as the jibes would have us believe, the campaigners for women’s rights, but the body shamers who deny women the straightforward fun associated with sport. Meanwhile, Carrie Dunn’s The Roar of the Lionesses (Pitch) offers valuable insight into women’s football.
The biography shelves hold three terrific lives of the extraordinary long-distance runner Emil Zátopek. All do justice to both his athletic achievements and his contested role in Czech national life, particularly after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Elegant accounts are given in Rick Broadbent’s William Hill-shortlisted Endurance (Wisden), with its compelling subplot about Zátopek’s dissident coach Jan Haluza, and Richard Askwith’s longlisted Today We Die a Little (Yellow Jersey), while Pat Butcher’s shorter, quirkier and more personal Quicksilver (Globerunner) draws on the author’s experience as both athlete and athletics journalist and includes some sharp political insight.
The much-missed Guardian sports writer Frank Keating might have seen three of the William Hill shortlist as fresh ammunition for a complaint about its taste for “misery memoirs”. And there is little to cheer in Chasing Shadows (Hardie Grant), Tim Lane and Elliot Cartledge’s life of cricketer and writer Peter Roebuck, who died in contested circumstances in 2011. But it is a brilliant investigation of a gifted and profoundly troubled man.
Both Oliver Kay’s Forever Young (Quercus) and Diana Nyad’s marathonswimming memoir Find a Way (Macmillan) carry “misery” stigmata, but also uplift. Kay’s story of Adrian Docherty, a Manchester United shooting star cut off by injury and an early death, is as much celebration of an engaging and original personality as lament for his loss. Meanwhile, Nyad, abused by her father and her school swimming coach, chronicles her astonishing achievement in her 60s.
Readers who still need cheering up can turn to cartoonist David Squires’s The Illustrated History of Football (Century), which should leave them both happier and better informed, a tough combination to achieve in 2016.
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