Booked: the year’s best sports writing

The Irish Examiner sportsdesk chose their favourite books of the year for a piece in last Saturday’s newpaper.

Here’s my two picks:

Boys Will Be Boys: The Bad Boys Won: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboy Dynasty
Jeff Pearlman
Harper Collins

When the Dallas Cowboys opened up the sparkling, box-fresh Texas Stadium with a defeat of the New York Giants in September, it was the denouement to the Jerry Jones story. Boys will be Boys explains how it began.

Jones, an oil magnate (predictably) from the Lone Star State purchased America’s Team in the early 90s – a franchise who at that point seemed to have gone to the well once too often. Rising from the smouldering ashes of a car crash 1989 season they went on to win their first Superbowl in four years and produce a swashbuckling, confident dynasty that defined the NFL in the 90s.

But for a team who took care of business on Sundays, they played hard every other day too.
The tale opens with future hall of famer Michael Irvin stabbing a teammate in the neck with a barber’s scissors, and from there spirals out of control.

Massive investment from Jones – along with the expertise of coach Jimmy Johnson – brought unprecedented victories on the pitch. But four Superbowls success in the 90s was paralleled by off-field excess. Drugs, orgies, fights, marital infidelities, and, finally, that stabbing which punctured, at last, the years of wild living in the infamous ‘White House’ – a neighbourhood home the squad rented collectively to facilitate their partying.

Though the tale is punctuated by trips to strip clubs and cocaine arrests, the Shakespearean power struggle at the heart of the Cowboys story is as fascinating. While their team spiralled out of control, owner Jones and manager Jimmy Johnson’s relationship descends into mis-trust, turf-battles and paranoia.

Written by Sports Illustrated writer Jason Pearlman – who previously depicted the beer-soaked tales of the womanising, vandalising ’86 New York Mets who claimed an unlikely World Series win in The Bad Guys Won, he has stuck to a winning formula. With a rainbow of colourful characters, this book is as hard-hitting – and fun- as the team it depicts so well.

The Beckham Experiment
Grant Wahl
Crown Books

A typical football book – particularly one of the game’s superstars – might be cracked open by a reader with some reservations about its journalistic merit. Not this one.

When David Beckham’s LA Galaxy lost the MLS Cup final on penalties to Real Salt Lake City last week a gaggle of reporters hopped open the locker-room door, strode in and asked a half-dressed Beckham for his reaction. This is American sports media.

If Beckham is now used to the underpants-revealing admittance the newspaper men receive in the States, he wasn’t when his LA Story began.

Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl slipped behind the velvet rope to earn unprecedented access to Goldenball’s life and the weird marriage of Hollywood and sport that this deal was.

Beckham’s foray into the United States was engineered by entertainment conglomerate AEG, which owns the Galaxy, and the former English captain’s first season in the US was scarred by disappointment, manipulation and disaster – on the field at least.
Wahl sketches a dressing room full of European journeymen, Californian surf dudes on 25k a year and America’s favourite son Landon Donovan all under the eccentric management of hirsute red-head and US legend Alexi Lalas.

Donovans’s unwavering criticism in this book of the new signing – that Beckham took the skipper’s armband, wouldn’t pick up tabs in restaurants and wasn’t committed to the Galaxy – are said to have produced a new resolve at the Home Depot Arena and sparked this season’s charge for the playoffs.

Though now part of the story, The Beckham Experiment offers the fullest picture yet of the growth of US soccer, the business of sport and Beckham’s role as a Hollywood leading man.