History of Sports

In 1965, 18-year old Lew Alcindor played basketball for Coach John Wooden at UCLA. It was the beginning of what was to become a 50-year long relationship....

The world's fastest times for the marathon have been dropping since the distance of 26.2 miles was made official nearly one hundred years ago....

An entertaining collection of insider yarns by an Aussie Test cricket legend....

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes....

No man has affected more runners in more ways than Bill Bowerman....

On 13 July 2014, World Cup Final, the last ten minutes of extra time: Germany forward Mario Götze, receiving a floated pass from his international teammate André Schürrle....

Downloaded over 10 million times a year, The Football Ramble podcast has established itself as the essential independent voice of football punditry....

Few sporting records capture the imagination quite like that of the highest individual score in Test cricket. It is the blue riband record of batting achievement, the ultimate statement of stamina and skill....

ECW was one extreme contradiction piled on top of another....

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world....

Let Stephen Curry, Charles Barkley, Grant Hill, Reggie Miller, and more tell you what it was like to take the floor against one of the greatest of all time. With a foreword by Jerry West and a new tribute from the author about Kobe’s tragic death....

History was made at the 2015 Belmont Stakes when American Pharoah won the Triple Crown, the first since Affirmed in 1978....

In the tradition of Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927, Wertheim captures these 90 seminal days against the backdrop of the nostalgia-soaked early 1980s, as he goes deeper into this 90-day interregnum through careful reporting and analysis to argue that this was the year we as Americans collectively traded in our pair of ratty Converses for a pair of sleek, heavily branded, geniusly marketed Nikes. This was the year, unbeknownst to us at the time, that sports went big-time.   

Take a rollicking tour through the sports world of 1996, when debuts, comebacks, movies, and pop culture crossover changed the sports landscape forever. From college to the Olympics to the pros; from the NBA to golf, tennis, and boxing, 1996 was home to athletes and teams who were among the best marketed, most beloved, colorful, and greatest in history. Sportswriter and author Jon Finkel uncovers the stories behind the stories while interviewing a who's who of '96ers to reveal in thrilling detail how their collective influence on sports and pop culture still resonates to this day.