Fall is the prime season to be a sports fan. The baseball playoffs—a million dramas in miniature—reach their apex, culminating in the World Series, which starts tonight; college football and the NFL are in full swing; the WNBA’s season wraps up just as the NBA and NHL begin playing; and soccer matches continue in all corners of all nations, all of the time. These months practically beg you to get lost in the excitement of a game-winning drive, the pathos of a missed layup at the buzzer, or the euphoria of a championship team spraying champagne all over the clubhouse.
For most fans, these are days of spectacle and adrenaline. But as tempting as it is to just shut your brain off, sports are always layered with meaning, and their influence extends far beyond their emotional appeal. For the ardent fan and the casual watcher alike, digging into the transformative trends behind the games—such as the rise of gambling, the increasing “sportswashing” of unethical policies and illiberal governments, and the labor-management battles between athletes and the powers that bankroll them—is a valuable pastime of its own. Here are seven great books that, like the games themselves, educate us, enthrall us, and remind us just how much the sports universe reflects (and defines) the wider world.
Blood, Sweat, & Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football, by Derrick E. White
Historically Black colleges and universities have been drivers of talent and vision in sports, especially football, for a century—but they represent a distinct culture. “Although the same notes appear, Black colleges and communities improvise, making the chords and composition all their own,” White writes in this fascinating book. “The result is a game that is both familiar and different.” Recently, that heritage has become nationally influential: Former NFL stars such as Deion Sanders, Michael Vick, and Eddie George have taken coaching positions at different HBCUs, for example, and perhaps the most visible media figure in sports, Stephen A. Smith, is an outspoken HBCU graduate. Because of this ascendency, White’s biography of the longtime Florida A&M coach Jake Gaither is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the trajectory of modern football. Gaither was the Rattlers’ coach for 24 years, before integration and throughout the civil-rights movement, and White shows him to be pivotal for both the sport and all Black athletes. But the book is much more than a dry prerequisite: It’s a rollicking read that showcases the people who created the legacies it admires.
Boom Town, by Sam Anderson
Back in 2012, Anderson, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, fell in love with Oklahoma City. He’d traveled there to write about the Thunder, just four years after the NBA team had relocated from Seattle to Oklahoma’s capital—an unlikely town for a major sports franchise. As he began to learn more about the city, the wild story of its founding (thousands of settlers claimed lots on a single day during a land rush), followed by alternating tragedies and glories, struck Anderson as a microcosm of American history. That assignment ended up inspiring him to write this brilliant, kaleidoscopic portrait of a place; his book isn’t just about sports, but it never forgets how teams and homes reflect each other’s fates, suggesting that a team begins to resemble its home the way a dog resembles its owner. Anderson hasn’t updated the book since the Thunder won the NBA championship in June, but once you’ve read it, you’ll never watch a Thunder game again without thinking of it.
Dream Team, by Jack McCallum
McCallum is the beloved great auk of NBA writers. He has seen everything—he began writing about the NBA for Sports Illustrated in 1981 and continues to comment on the league today. (This past summer, he wrote a lovely valedictory for the career of the San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.) This history of the gold-medal-winning 1992 U.S. Olympic men’s-basketball team—the one with Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, and Magic Johnson—is both a glorious romp and the ideal product of a Hall of Fame reporter emptying his notebook. The anecdotes from Barcelona are endless: McCallum depicts the team partying through Spain, opponents from other nations stopping to ask for autographs, and an off-camera, no-outsiders-allowed scrimmage that for decades many fans thought to be apocryphal (he even digs up the box score). Dream Team will charm those only passingly interested in the NBA, but it remains indispensable for anyone who declares, as the league did in its mid-’90s marketing, “I love this game.”
Open, by Andre Agassi
This raw, honest, and surprisingly moving look at one of the most high-profile careers in the history of tennis is widely, and rightfully, considered the best athletic autobiography out there. When he was active, Agassi was often, incorrectly, considered more flash than substance on the court—but the life behind the shoe ads was filled with strife. Agassi was drafted into the sport by his father and rarely found joy in it; he calls the tennis academy he was forced to attend as a teenager a “glorified prison camp.” (This woe would eventually lead to an issue with drugs: Agassi once tested positive for crystal meth, which he lied about to tennis officials to avoid a suspension.) In light of all this, Agassi’s successes end up feeling less like triumphs and more like escapes: You root for him not to win, but just to make it through. You’ll cheer when he eventually, somehow, does.
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Lords of the Realm, by John Helyar
That sports are big business is hardly news, but Helyar’s book shows just how much the story of professional sports is truly that of organized labor—and how ugly things can get. Lords of the Realm is a classic profile of the relationship between the men who own baseball teams and the men who play for them. The book covers more than 50 years of history, beginning in the early 20th century and ending on the eve of the 1994 strike, which famously canceled the World Series. Again and again, Helyar illuminates undeniable connections between the people who ran baseball then and the people who still do. In this sport, he demonstrates, rich men with family money have long attempted to hold down working-class players, many of them men of color, who have only a few years of earning power—and he then explains how the players’ union built itself up out of self-protection before engaging in regular, protracted battle. Though the book is now more than 30 years old, it could not feel more relevant: Baseball’s current collective-bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season, and yet another labor fight over a potential salary cap (something the union has fought for decades) is brewing.
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The Revolt of the Black Athlete, by Harry Edwards
In 2020, during the widespread protests following the death of George Floyd, athletes were politically active in a way that was nearly unprecedented: At one point, the Milwaukee Bucks, responding to the Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooting of Jacob Blake, actually refused to play an NBA playoff game. But there were antecedents, as Edwards, a sociologist, shows in this book. The Bucks’ strike recalled, among other things, a 1961 NBA boycott by Bill Russell and other players. And it echoed the 1968 Olympic protests, in which two Black athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, gave the Black Power salute on the Olympic podium. The Revolt of the Black Athlete tells the story of that action: the circumstances that led to it and the blowback that would follow. It was an unofficial text of the mid-century athletic-activist movement; Edwards himself even advised players (both the book and Edwards show up in High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh’s 2019 movie about athlete empowerment). At a moment when American politics are more enmeshed with sports than ever, as the U.S. prepares to host the World Cup and the Olympics, this look at athletes’ political power is crucial.
A Woman’s Game: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women’s Football, by Suzanne Wrack
In 2019, the U.S. women’s national soccer team—a charismatic, politically active group that had openly feuded with President Donald Trump—took the pitch for the World Cup final against the Netherlands, and came out as heroic winners. America was watching: The match represented a modern pinnacle of popularity for the women’s game in the U.S. and globally. Wrack’s comprehensive history of women’s soccer begins in the early 20th century, when it was so popular that England’s Football Association, claiming that the sport was “unsuitable for females,” actually banned women from playing for more than five decades. The book then continues to the present day, when the game has reached new heights. Wrack is straightforward in her storytelling, but she’s clear about what the act of play truly means. Victory isn’t the only thing on the line: Women playing elite soccer defy those who attempt to belittle their accomplishments—something the USWNT, who took constant heat from Trump, understand vividly.
