Mark Richardson and Andrew Mulligan from the Crowd Goes Wild look at the best sporting biographies and make their weekend picks.
In light of a couple of anticipated autobiographies released this week from Kevin Pietersen and Roy Keane our list today is of sports whose stars penned lines that are some of the most entertaining and revealing of all time. As always this list isn't definitive and can be used in the court of public opinion.
1 Cricket
Kevin, Kevin, Kevin ... oh Mr Pietersen thank you for the insights into the state of the England cricket team and for giving us "Mr Cheese" (keeper Matt Prior) and how people would dare challenge you if England failed. Ian Botham (My Autobiography) had all the rock star qualities you knew he experienced. On the flip side our own Jeremy Coney's Playing Mantis is one of the best our little country has produced. That fine arts degree in English was always guaranteed a masters degree in English. Oh, and Mark's Thinking Negatively is a wonderful insight in a mad man's plight against self-doubt and redemption.
2 Football
We'll leave behind the bland dross of Wayne Rooney's effort, brilliantly titled My Story published when he was 22 in 2008 or how Ashley "Cashley" Coles almost lost it when he was offered the measly sum of $122,500 a week at Arsenal to instead trumpet Sir Alex Ferguson's self titled second autobiography released last year. It reveals the time he kicked a boot into David Beckham's face (not the face, Alex!) to the management of Roy Keane who has revealed when he was asked to return his company car after the bitter falling-out with Manchester United, he kept it for another three months, and tried to drive it into the ground because "every victory is vital". So many great football autobiographies, so many maniacal stories to be told. (Favourite Ferguson fact - he scored a hat-trick in Auckland when a Scottish XI toured here in the '60's.)
3 US Sport
George Plimpton's 1996 Paper Lion is in here on a technicality for the simple fact he was an NFL player for the Detroit Lions but he was technically a journalist sitting on the bench taking it all in. This is way before HBO's Hard Knocks gets you inside an NFL team with issues each NFL season. The insight of the locker room in celebration and angst is revealing. So is Ball Four from Jim Bouton, a pitcher who decided to write a bit and he wrote a whole lot about the Seattle Pilots (one season of existence) and the Houston Astros who he was traded to. It was so good/bad for baseball the then commissioner of the Majors try to make Bouton sign a letter saying it was all pure fiction. You can't make this stuff up. Neither could Bouton. Special mention to the NBA's North Korean unofficial ambassador in Dennis Rodman, who turned up in a wedding dress to promote his book, Bad As I Wanna Be in 1996.
