Sports Books for the Fan in Your Family

Is there a sports fan in your family who likes to read? Do you need a last-minute gift for the holidays? Check out these three sports books recommended by the AJT’s sportswriter.

Warren Spahn: A Biography of the Legendary Lefty

By Lew Freedman

Long before Tom Glavine and later Max Fried toed the rubber for the Braves, there was Hall of Fame lefty Warren Spahn who starred for the franchise in the mid-1900s when it called Boston and Milwaukee home. While Spahn passed away in 2003, no one had chronicled his marvelous career in a full-length biography until prolific baseball history author Lew Freedman did so in “Warren Spahn: A Biography of the Legendary Lefty.” Considering Spahn largely remains unknown to younger generations of baseball fans, Freedman’s biography stands as an important contribution to the rich baseball literary canon.

How great was Spahn? With 363 career victories, he is the all-time winningest left-handed pitcher. Given the current state of the game, it is highly unlikely anyone will ever come close to touching that grand total – a number that would have been considerably higher had Spahn not spent three years fighting in the European Theater of World War II when he was in his early-to-mid-twenties. Spahn may have grown up in snowy Buffalo, N.Y., but as Freedman illustrates, he still found the arctic conditions of the Battle of the Bulge to be as daunting as any element of combat. When World War II ended, Spahn, at that point a lieutenant, remained in Germany for months, not knowing if – or even when – he would resume his budding career with the Boston Braves. Readers can’t help but juxtapose Spahn’s predicament to that of the modern-day superstar free agent who has multiple suitors offering them tens of millions for their services.

Over the next couple decades, Spahn, of course, would cement his legacy as arguably the all-time greatest left-handed pitcher, piloting the Boston Braves to a 1948 National League pennant and, later in his career, a 1957 world championship, after the franchise had transplanted itself to Milwaukee, a city that, by all accounts, had a far more rabid fanbase than Beantown. Spahn never pitched in Atlanta but there was a nine-foot-tall, 1,000-pound statue of him erected outside the Braves’ old home of Turner Field, which is pictured in this book.

Spahn pretty much had a squeaky-clean reputation – at least compared to those of some other Hall of Famers – but Freedman does delve into a couple issues he had with managers, including fellow Hall of Famer Casey Stengel, and occasional insecurity over salary matters. But those are mere blemishes on an otherwise sparkling career that easily qualifies him for belonging to the pantheon of all-time Braves legends.

Home Run King: The Remarkable Record of Hank Aaron

By Dan Schlossberg

Understandably, there’s no shortage of books chronicling the heroic life of Henry Aaron. But given that 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s vaunted career home run record (which was later shattered by Barry Bonds in 2007), baseball writer Dan Schlossberg, a longtime chronicler of Braves history, devoted a work exclusively toward Aaron’s momentous feat of eclipsing Ruth a half-century ago.

It doesn’t take readers long to conclude that Schlossberg was the right person for the project. In the foreword to “Home Run King: The Remarkable Record of Hank Aaron,” former big-league player and manager Dusty Baker, himself a teammate of the late Aaron’s who was on deck when the slugger made history, wrote: “Dan Schlossberg is more than a fan of Hank Aaron; he is especially empathetic because he suffered his share of prejudice as a Jewish American.” Indeed, Schlossberg, who has been writing about baseball for over 50 years, knew Aaron personally (as well as Baker and many other characters central to this narrative) and gives readers insight into the tremendous hurdles Aaron, as a Black man plying his trade in the Deep South in the 1970s, faced in his pursuit of baseball immortality. As Schlossberg traces the arc of Aaron’s life leading up to his milestone on April 8, 1974, it is poignantly clear how bigotry remained omnipresent at every stage – whether it was haunting memories of hiding under a bed while the KKK marched down his family’s street in Mobile, Ala., hearing racist vitriol from the stands while playing in the minors in Jacksonville, Fla., or the hundreds – maybe thousands – of death threats directed toward him in the days leading up to the momentous evening of April 8, 1974. Even the following decade, when Aaron was up for Hall of Fame induction in 1982, nine voters left the obvious Hall of Famer off their Cooperstown ballots.

Undoubtedly, “Home Run King” tells Aaron’s story in light of his chasing Ruth, but it also weaves in other lesser-known aspects of Aaron’s life such as his close friendship with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and post-baseball business endeavors involving incredibly successful investments in car dealerships, restaurants, and fast-food franchises. All told, after readers finish Schlossberg’s relatively short, but nonetheless highly informative book, they will have a better understanding as to why Aaron was not just a baseball luminary, but rather a true American hero.

Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon

By Mirin Fader

Three years after penning her New York Times bestselling biography of Giannis Antetokounmpo, author Mirin Fader has delivered another riveting bio of a towering NBA figure, Hakeem Olajuwon, in “Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon.” The Nigerian-born Olajuwon, as Fader so deftly illustrates, was a trailblazer as the first international player to win NBA MVP – and one who to this day has remained a devout Muslim even while attaining global superstardom.

Grounded in hundreds of original interviews — no easy feat for a basketball biography given that roster sizes are so limited – Fader’s second biography of an international basketball icon pulls back the curtain on one of the most dominant players of the 1990s who steered the Houston Rockets to back-to-back titles while Michael Jordan, ironically drafted two spots after Olajuwon in the 1984 draft, was on hiatus. In doing so, Fader brings to light her protagonist’s global ambassadorship, down-to-earth appeal to teammates and coaches, and passion for mentoring the next generation of NBA greats such as LeBron James among other commendable attributes.

By the same token, Fader doesn’t shy away from delving into Olajuwon’s darker past episodes, most of which have been long forgotten, especially by younger basketball fans whose lasting memories of “Hakeem the Dream” are of the big man out dueling Patick Ewing and Shaquille O’Neal in consecutive NBA Finals (chronicled here along with fantastic images). There is an entire chapter devoted to Olajuwon’s trail of early career mishaps, namely alleged assaults of a TV cameraman and convenience store clerk, rumors of drug use, and a lawsuit filed by his former girlfriend, Lita Spencer, who claimed that Olajuwon caused her to suffer “extreme mental anguish, humiliation, and disgrace” by forcing her to bear a child out of wedlock and then reneging on his promise to marry her after she proved she could bear children.

Because “Dream” is so heavy on personal anecdotes (more are flattering than not) and light on game-by-game minutiae, readers absorb an intimate narrative that portrays the enigmatic, larger-than-life Olajuwon as the groundbreaking yet complicated basketball icon that he truly was.