As a veteran sportswriter, Furman Bisher has been Face to Face with the most influential sports figures the country has to offer. He pulls no punches and leaves no question un-asked in this collection of his all-time best interviews. From baseball to boxing and from Jack Nicklaus to Red Grange, Furman Bisher shares his biggest scoops and most heart-warming stories. Shoeless Joe Jackson, in 1949, agreed to allow Bisher to help him present his side of the Black Sox Scandal, something that had never been done before. Bisher shadowed the Petty racing family at their compound in Level Cross, North Carolina, and discovered the secret behind their success: family. He broke a story about brutality in college football, which led to a nation-wide scandal involving a shady conversation between Bryant and Georgia athletic director Wallace Butts about Georgia's game plan; read Bisher's explanation of this case of mistaken identity. In Face to Face, Bisher provides insight into the private lives of sporting men from all generations, sports, shapes, sizes and dispositions--golfer Arnold Palmer, Marlins manager Jack McKeon, boxer Muhammad Ali, UCLA coach John Wooden, media mogul Ted Turner, and more--open their hearts and their homes to legendary journalist Furman Bisher and to you.

This collection celebrates the famed Masters' golf tournament, as some of America's best known sports writers--such as Grantland Rice and Jim Murray--praise the event's illustrious history and traditions.

The extraordinary story of how Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and Joe Namath, his star quarterback at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to victory and transformed football into a truly national pastime. During the bloodiest years of the civil rights movement, Bear Bryant and Joe Namath-two of the most iconic and controversial figures in American sports-changed the game of college football forever. Brilliantly and urgently drawn, this is the gripping account of how these two very different men-Bryant a legendary coach in the South who was facing a pair of ethics scandals that threatened his career, and Namath a cocky Northerner from a steel mill town in Pennsylvania-led the Crimson Tide to a national championship. To Bryant and Namath, the game was everything. But no one could ignore the changes sweeping the nation between 1961 and 1965-from the Freedom Rides to the integration of colleges across the South and the assassination of President Kennedy. Against this explosive backdrop, Bryant and Namath changed the meaning of football. Their final contest together, the 1965 Orange Bowl, was the first football game broadcast nationally, in color, during prime time, signaling a new era for the sport and the nation. Award-winning biographer Randy Roberts and sports historian Ed Krzemienski showcase the moment when two thoroughly American traditions-football and Dixie-collided. A compelling story of race and politics, honor and the will to win, Rising Tide captures a singular time in America. More than a history of college football, this is the story of the struggle and triumph of a nation in transition and the legacy of two of the greatest heroes the sport has ever seen.

All sports fans want to see their team win the championship but being a fan is about more than watching your team win the big game. As part of an ongoing best selling series, "100 Things Yellow Jackets" helps Georgia Tech lovers get the most out of being a fan. Get ready to enjoy your team on a new, more involved, level.

Essays on American sportswriters, for which some are the first studies to appear anywhere. Discusses the styles of sportswriting employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Includes information on twentieth-century authors who crossed over from"serious" literature to sportswriting, as well as the history of sportswriting.