The thing about books: They’re immortal. They can be read anytime.

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — For most of my sports reporting career, I read nothing but fiction. A way to escape the grind of reporting the truth, I suppose.

I still read my Pulitzer Prize-winning novel every year – “Night Watch” was OK but “North Woods” kept the reader more interested – but this year, I started reading more non-fiction sports books. Probably because they kept showing up in the mail. After “American Kings,” here were my favorite non-fiction sports books:


Seventeen and Oh: Miami, 1972 and the NFL’s Only Perfect Season

A personal and comprehensively researched account of the Miami Dolphins’ perfect season by Fisher, who grew up in Miami during the Dolphins’ formative years. The book was published in 2022. I had it on my shelf for a while before finally picking it up. The superbly written book makes it clear the 17-0 season was primarily the result of Don Shula’s coaching genius and that the key player was quarterback Bob Griese, even though he missed nine games with a broken ankle and finished with ordinary statistics compared to modern-era quarterbacks.

Think about that. The Dolphins went a perfect 17-0 with a backup quarterback, albeit former league MVP Earl Morrall, who went 11-0, including two in the playoffs.

While the Dolphins’ perfect season has been threatened by the likes of the 1985 Bears, 1998 Broncos and 2007 Patriots, it stands 53 years later as the league’s only undefeated team, even if the run featured six, one-score wins, including all three in the postseason.

The bonus to this book is it provides a vivid cultural retrospective of America during the early stages of Nixon’s Watergate scandal. I was 13 years old in 1972. It was nice to learn what I wasn’t old enough to understand then.


Hurdle-isms

When Hurdle was the Rockies’ hitting coach and manager from 1997-2009, his pregame press gatherings often included a phrase of wisdom, an inspirational message, a quote that made you think.

He put some of them in his collection of “Hurdle-isms.”

It’s an easy read, only 122 pages, so it’s easy to carry around and skip around to find motivational words and affirmations that apply to your current situation.

Two of my favorites were Hurdle-ism No. 11: “There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who are humble and those who are about to be” and Hurdle-ism No. 17 (Under the category of ‘Have a high standard’) “Lower the bar and you lose the winners; raise the bar and you lose the losers.”


The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire

This book has been around since 2018 but a friend at the gym gave to me as a gift this summer. I couldn’t put it down. There is so much interesting history recaptured here of the early days of the NFL. Hard to believe that through World War II, the NFL trailed baseball, college football, boxing and horse racing in American sports popularity. Eisenberg credits five owners – the Bears’ George Halas, Washington’s George Preston Marshall, the Giants’ Tim Mara, the Steelers’ Art Rooney and the Eagles’ Bert Bell – for keeping the professional football league afloat during its initial three decades.

The flamboyant Marshall brought entertainment to the league, introducing the playoffs, cheerleaders, a marching band and rules that helped increase scoring. What he didn’t bring until he was forced by political pressure were black players. His unabashed bigotry permanently sullied what could have been a legacy as one of the league’s foremost innovative pioneers.

The quintet was deferential to Halas, the league’s king for decades, even if Bell became its first effective commissioner. Rooney was the nice guy who often sacrificed his own team’s good for the good of the league. I was disappointed the Packers’ Curly Lambeau didn’t get more credit from Eisenberg.


To Absent Friends from Red Smith

One of the greatest-ever American sports columnists, Smith collected and edited 179 of his newspaper columns for this book. Alas he died in 1982, just before his book was published, so he too was absent from reading the final project. My favorite columns were those that profiled Toots Shor, Connie Mack, Grantland Rice, Babe Ruth, Vince Lombardi, Rocky Marciano, Tom Meany, Paul “Big Poison” Waner – mythical sports heroes I had never seen on TV (except for Lombardi) but had read so much about. Smith’s accounts made these legends come to life as real people.


The Players’ Coach – Tom Moore

By Tom Moore and Rick Stroud

I picked up this book because Moore was Peyton Manning’s offensive coordinator throughout the quarterback’s tenure with the Indianapolis Colts and I wanted to learn more about Manning. Moore delivered some insight although most of it we already knew – that Manning was a football student who demanded his coaches try to know more than he does.

There were shaded box coaching tips interspersed throughout the book, a nice touch, including, “Things you have to guard against: (Complaining). He credited Bruce Arians as the coach who was the best at not allowing his players or coaches to (complain) about anything.