Scarecrow Press imprint: 1180 books

In 1963, 17 charter members were inducted into the newly established Pro Football Hall of Fame. Joining the likes of Red Grange, Bronko Nagurski, George Halas, and Sammy Baugh was Detroit Lions quarterback Dutch Clark. A bona fide superstar for the NFL in the 1930s, Clark led the Lions to success...

Updated through the 2012 Olympics. On a July afternoon in 1999, the proudest moment for U.S. soccer occurred in Pasadena, California. In the presence of more than 90,000 fans and viewed by another 40 million on television, the U.S. women outlasted China to win the World Cup. Although the United...

There is no sporting event more popular than the World Cup. For one month every four years, hundreds of millions of people around the world turn their attention to the tournament. People call in sick to work, fans pack into bars to watch games or stay home for days at a time glued to their TV sets,...

The sport of tennis has been played in one form or another for more than 800 years. It can trace its roots to games played by monks in the 12th century. Through the years the game has evolved from one in which the ball was struck with the hands to the modern game in which rackets are used to propel...

At the 1984 Olympics, American Scott Hamilton skated into the history books when he claimed a gold medal in Sarajevo. Beside him the entire time was his coach, Don Laws. A member of the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame and a U.S. Junior Champion, Laws is one of the most respected and admired ice skating...

Now in Paperback! Early in 1971, Five Fingers of Death premiered in a New York movie theater. This was America's first look at a Chinese martial arts movie. In Chicago that same year, Duel of the Iron Fist debuted. With the release of Bruce Lee's films, the market exploded. And thus began America's...

The nearly 150-year-old sport of cycling had its first competition in France in 1868. Soon afterward, the need arose for purpose-built cycling tracks because of poor road conditions at the time. Racing on blocked off pieces of street or grass soon evolved into racing on special tracks called velodromes....

Boxing is one of the oldest sports in the world, reaching back to the Ancient Greeks, although it has become popular only in the past century or so. But, in some ways, it is a rather complicated sport since – to avoid unnecessary harm – it has been endowed with rules to keep it clean, referees...

Founded in 1920, the National Football League chose famed athlete Jim Thorpe as its first president, a position he held briefly until a successor was elected. From 1921 to 1939, Joe F. Carr guided the sport of professional football with intelligence, hard work, and a passion that built the foundation...

Wrestling as a legitimate contest is one of the oldest, if not the oldest form of sport. There are cave drawings depicting memorable matches in France, which are over 15,000 years old. Egyptian and Babylonian reliefs depict wrestling bouts where wrestlers are using most of the holds known to the modern-day...

Mike "King" Kelly was the hard-living, hard-drinking son of a Civil War veteran whose skills at baseball and infectious charm turned him into the game's first hero, and a symbol of what it meant to be a celebrity in America in the 1880s and 1890s. Slide, Kelly, Slide reacquaints baseball...

While major league baseball gained popularity in large American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was still relatively unseen by small town inhabitants who could only read about it in the newspaper or catch an exhibition game as major league teams traveled through the United States....

Gridiron football or American football or just plain football is the most popular sport in the United States in the 21st century. Although attempts have been made to develop the sport outside North America, it is still predominantly a North American sport with similar games (but significant rules...

The 100 Greatest Jews in Sports takes the greatest Jewish athletes in all major sports from the past eleven decades and ranks them against each other, using a limited scope and quantitative criteria. Each decade has seen someone new emerge as the greatest Jewish athlete, from boxer Abe Attell to baseballs'...