The SportsThink Review #125
June 27, 2025: 42 For 42, Part 2
The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter.
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Howdy folks, happy Friday. My sincere thanks to the folks who reached out after last week’s edition, it was great to catch up with some of you. If you missed it, here it is: part 1 of the 42 sports books that shaped my life (in honor of turning 42)
Gonna keep moving down the list this week with nine more titles. Covering a much shorter span of years this time around, 2005 to mid-2008. College was done, I was mostly living back at home and ostensibly drifting toward law school. Watching The OC, lining up outside of shoe stores for limited edition sneakers (stupid), and grilling a lot.
42 for 42: The post-college-quarter-life-crisis era
Coaching Soccer: The Official Coaching Book of the Dutch Soccer Association by Bert Van Lingen
I’m where I am today because I fell into coaching soccer the year that I graduated from college. I had quit playing my sophomore year and was at peace with walking away from the game. Fall 2005, my old high school coach reached out and asked if I would take on the JV team. He'd heard I was back in town and needed a
warm bodycoach. By the end of the first practice, I was in love. Still the best job I ever had. I kinda winged it my first year, focusing on conditioning and an obsession with practice sessions where no one was standing around. Turned out I was on to something…Amazon tells me I bought this in June 2006, between my first and second seasons coaching. I’d picked up some other coaching books, but this was the one that stuck. If you are a soccer person, you know that the Dutch youth development system is legendary. Here’s the whole book: the game teaches the game. No (American style) drills with cones and 20 players waiting their turn. You play and you play a lot. 2 against 2, 4 against 4, 11 against 11, whatever. The game teaches the game. (I can’t find my copy, but in my mind, there’s a picture of a kid dribbling through cones with a big “X” through the photo…I could totally be imagining this, but that’s basically the spirit of the book.)
This book crystallized my instincts from the first year and I promptly dropped the few drills I was using. Parents and other coaches would ask me about my “methods” and they would scoff when I would say “we run and we do pushups and we play.” They thought I was being coy, but that was it. I’m not sure how much we can celebrate a 3-peat at the JV level, but hey, a champion is a champion. This should be mandatory reading for every American soccer coach. Probably for every coach, regardless of sport.
(Old man moment: in my mind, those players are forever 15 and 16, way more innocent than they realized. I occasionally hear that they’ve gotten married or had babies and I’m in shock. Of course, I was basically a kid then too and these guys are pushing 40 themselves now.)
The Blindside by Michael Lewis
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Road Trip Into the Heart of Fan Mania by Warren St. John
Dixieland Delight by Clay Travis
A football trio. The post-college years saw the ascendance of football in my sports consumption, college football especially. I remember the hype for The Blindside in the wake of Moneyball’s success; the book was sort of billed as “moneyball for football.” I know I preordered it and devoured it. At the time, I it really helped elevate my understanding of the actual playing of football, and I dug Lewis’ evolutionary approach to the subject. I haven’t read it since and I’m curious as to how it holds up…it may be unfair, but I’m beginning to think of it as part of the larger group of “HEY LOOK CONTRARIAN THINKING!” books of its era (Gladwell, Freakonomics, etc.) and some of that stuff has aged poorly. But at the time, I was very much sold on Lewis and this book.
There’s a lot of college recruiting action in Lewis’ book, but it’s basically about the NFL. As I mentioned, I was getting deep into college football at this point. Deep as in get up early (west coast time!) to watch all of Gameday and then watch games all day and night and probably watch Fresno State or whoever playing at Hawaii around the time happy and smart people were heading to the bars. This is not healthy behavior. I trust many of you have shared this sickness at one point or another. Spoiled by the pro sports scene in LA and lacking any familial connections to UCLA or USC (like just about everyone else I knew), I was a late bloomer when it came to college sports. I just cheered for all of the local colleges when they were in big games and got on with my Lakers/Raiders/Kings/Dodgers fandom. But something clicked for me in these years…probably a combination of the local excitement surrounding Bush/Leinart era USC and my growing obsession with the parts of the country I had long ignored.
I know I read the St. John and the Travis back to back, I’m thinking the Amazon algorithm probably did that for me. Both are basically SEC travelogues. St. John focuses on Bama—his alma mater—while Travis travels to every school in the conference, basically getting shitfaced with each fanbase.
These were big for me at the time, like really big. Beyond the football obsession, I was getting deep into country music and had this simmering sense that I needed to be somewhere else. These were happy years, but also—in retrospect—rather aimless at times. I was drifting for the 9 months a year that I wasn’t coaching soccer. Both of these books gave me a glimpse of what else was out there in the rest of the US, taking me to locales that seemed foreign and familiar at once. I flipped through the St. John sometime last year; he’s a great writer and I’d recommend that one. It’s more thoughtful and, for lack of a better word, anthropological. I owe it to myself to revisit the Travis, but in the years since this book came out he’s turned into such an insufferable media personality that I’m not sure if I have it in me. But I’m grateful to him for writing it, because it helped nudge me toward Texas and the rest of my life.Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports by Dave Zirin
A sports book with its title lifted from a Public Enemy song? And the foreword is written by Chuck D?? I had to get this. I’m reasonably sure I picked it up at Myopic Books in Chicago (I’m thrilled to see they’re still in business—great bookshop). At the time, it was eye-opening: an aggressive left-wing critique of the many shortcomings of American sports. I wasn’t thinking about sport-related graduate school yet, but this was certainly influential in nudging me in that direction.
I’ve revisited Zirin here and there in recent years, and I’m a little torn on where I land. My politics aren’t quite the same as they were when I first encountered his work, and while he remains a key voice in American sports criticism—arguably the most “mainstream” critic we have—some of the early writing now feels a bit flat. The arguments aren’t always as developed as I’d like, though the righteousness is there.
In fairness, I should also acknowledge a bit of personal baggage. I met Dave in 2011 and we got along fine (I think). He asked if I’d be interested in writing something for The Nation, where he was (and still is) the sports editor. Of course I said yes. A couple months later, he asked if I could write something on bike polo (which is real) and could I write it very quickly. I happened to be in Greece at the time and gave up a day on the beach to churn something out. The piece never ran. I got a quick response along the lines of “great thanks, hopefully they’ll run it,” and that was the last I heard.
I get it. Publishing is complicated, and I doubt he gave it a second thought. But I was young and excited, and it stung a little. Still, I’m choosing to be grateful for the experience. Maybe there’s a lesson in there for younger writers and students: manage your expectations, and think twice before giving up a day on a Greek beach to write something unpaid. Namaste.
How Soccer Explains The World by Franklin Foer
National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and The Rest of The World Plays Soccer by Stefan Syzmanski and Andrew Zimbalist
Offside! Soccer and American Exceptionalism by Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman
Another football trio that’s worth batching, but the other kind of football this time around. I think of these together, but there was a decent gap between reading the Foer and the next two. I’m reasonably confident that I picked up How Soccer Explains The World at Barnes & Noble, from a table featuring soccer books in advance of the 2006 World Cup. (There was also A Thinking Fan’s Guide To The World Cup, which was so smug and lame; a book for hipsters and elitists who wanted to enjoy sports without admitting that sports are cool and for everyone.)
The early 2000s featured a lot of these “how X explains Y” type books, but Foer’s was pretty good. It was perfect for me, tying together the personal threads of soccer, a political science degree, and high school Model United Nations (how cool was I?). The basic premise was that we can understand globalization through soccer and I tend to still accept this premise. Years later, I would write and edit a sport and geopolitics column for the geopolitical intelligence site Stratfor, and this book was absolutely foundational in my thinking about sport’s place in the broader world.National Pastime and Offside! are somewhat in the same vein, but more academic studies (the subtitles tell you enough about what they are trying to accomplish.) I think they still hold up and any student trying to do soccer seriously in academia should read them. There’s a sort of before and after here, as I read these shortly after committing to graduate school at Texas. I very much expected that I’d eventually be doing similar academic work (spoiler: beyond the Stratfor column, I wouldn’t). I wish I remember who it was, but someone on a grad school visit had recommended them. This is the period where I’m feeling like I’ve really fooled the universe: you mean I can read these sports books as part of a graduate degree? At a real university? Amazing. I still feel that way sometimes.
Michael Jordan and The New Global Capitalism by Warren LaFeber
My experience with this one is sort of a synthesis of the soccer books above. Bought and read around the same time as National Pastime and Offside!, but written for a mainstream audience more in the vein of the Foer book. As the title suggests, this is another “how x explains y” type book, but it’s a good one. You get a bit of Jordan biography and then basketball and Nike etc. become the vector for understanding globalization, hyper-capitalism, etc. This one holds up and I’ve even used it in class; when I first read it, it had not even occurred to me that I’d be assigning books to students one day.
As always, thanks for reading. Will pause on the book series next week, to share my annual 4th of July Great American Sports Reads edition. But there are more books to come! Please use the comments to tell me about your favorite sports books and please share the newsletter far and wide!
See you soon,
Tolga