TOP 5: GIFTS FOR SPORTS BOOKWORMS

This has been in the hopper for a couple weeks, but with Dec. 25 less than two weeks away, it's now or never for our recommended sports books (quote, unquote).

Here's five books-about-sports that I read in 2006 and highly recommend. I'm not including Stephen Brunt's Searching For Bobby Orr, since it hardly needs a blogger's thumbs-up. That book should sell itself. Like one of Brunt's colleagues at Knopf Canada, Diane Martin, told me when I was researching a piece for Quill & Quire back in the summer, "We don't even have a sports category. Our category is just Stephen Brunt."

TO HATE LIKE THIS IS TO BE HAPPY FOREVER: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting; And Occasionally Unbiased Account Of The Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry by Will Blythe (Harper Collins, $14.40 paperback, $21.74 hardcover)
A good gift for: The person who not only watches basketball, but screams at the players on the television screening for not "boxing out" or "having good spacing."

Blythe, a quondam literary editor at Esquire, is an obsessive North Carolina Tarheels fan. At loose ends (and in something of a mid-life crisis) in late 2004, he set out to "paddle up the Nile of my Duke hatred" and figure out just why he despites the Duke Blue Devils basketball team (or as they're known around here, the University of New Jersey at Durham Floorslappers.)

The one common complaint critics had was that Blythe spends too much time trying to convince non-adherents that Duke-Carolina is the greatest rivalry in all of sports. (Uh, India-Pakistan in cricket? Rangers-Celtic in soccer? Yankees-Red Sox?) Maybe so, maybe not, but it works, since Blythe delicately balances journalistic detachment and his bubbling hatred for Duke and their "ratface" coach, Mike Krzyzewski. It also doesn't hurt that he just happened to write this book during the '04-05 season when North Carolina -- take that, Dookies! -- won the NCAA championship.

Some people get revved up for March Madness by watching Hoosiers, although you could probably get the same buzz reading To Hate Like This.

THE BEST GAME YOU CAN NAME by Dave Bidini (McClelland & Stewart, $23.09)
A good gift for: Someone who plays rec hockey, or used to play the game and no longer has the time.

Dave Bidini, musician and writer, is a Canadian treasure. The way he writes about hockey is an antidote to every white-bread hockey announcer, every hair-gelled NHL insider and every guy who thinks you're interested in how he's doing in his hockey pool.

I haven't read his latest, Five Hole Stories, yet, but The Best Game You Can Name gets the true hockey culture -- at a level far below the NHL -- about 99.9% right. Bidini writes about rec hockey and the fun those will an admittedly limited skill have playing it. He mixes in interviews with players from the 1970s and '80s generation, who prove to be a lot more cerebral than most people ever would have guessed from those between-periods Hockey Night in Canada interviews.

SAVING THE GAME: Pro Hockey's Quest To Raise Its Games From Crisis To New Heights by Mark Moore (McClelland & Stewart, $23.09)
A good gift for: The serious hockey fan -- but not someone's who serious in the sense of being in three different hockey pools or owning four different team sweaters.

Like his brother Steve, who was the victim of Todd Bertuzzi's criminal assault in March 2004, Mark Moore is a Harvard-educated hockey player who had to quit the game due to injuries (in his case, concussions).

Saving The Game, while about 50 pages too long (you can tell the author isn't that far removed from the tedious world of academia), does contain some ideas that really haven't been discussed since the NHL resumed play in 2005. Moore writes intelligently, he writes passionately, and while some of what he's proposing seems less than feasible, he makes strong arguments for changes to equipment, a shorter season, and 4-on-4 hockey, among other changes.

CLEMENTE: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster, $23.76)
A good gift for: A baseball fan, maybe someone of a slightly older generation.

Maraniss has written bios of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi, but in baseball fans' minds at least, the bar is set much higher when you write about a legendary, long-dead Hall of Fame ballplayer than a U.S. president or football coach. Clemente is a little like the Denzel Washington movie The Hurricane -- the narrative occasionally plays fast and loose with the truth, but it packs an emotional wallop. At the same time, Hardball Times found several factual errors that are just slightly disturbing when they're being in a book written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

Regardless, that can be mostly forgiven since so much about Roberto Clemente is shrouded in myth and Maraniss does do fairly well at peeling the layers away. The chapters on Clemente's early years and the circumstances surrounding his death on Dec. 31, 1972 while attempting to fly relief supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua alone make this worth a read.

ROB NEYER'S BIG BOOK OF BASEBALL BLUNDERS: A Complete Guide To The Worst Decisions and Stupidest Moments in Baseball History by Rob Neyer (Simon & Schuster, $16.72)
A good gift for: Baseball stats geeks, or anyone who thinks he can run the Blue Jays better than John Gibbons and/or J.P. Ricciardi.

Neyer's the best among the younger new-school baseball writers who grew up at the knee of the Godfather of 'em all, Bill James. Like his other books, this is one that your typical baseball obsessive can read in an afternoon. It's that addictive reading about boneheaded trades and bad free-agent signings, especially with a writer of Neyer's wit.

(All prices are from Chapters.ca.)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.