Download or read book Why Fantasy Football Matters written by Erik Barmack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talking Trash, Trading Studs, and Drafting Sleepers -- an Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Obsession U.S. businesses lose $200 million in productivity each football season because employees are managing their fantasy squads instead of working. In Why Fantasy Football Matters (And Our Lives Do Not), two grizzled veterans revel in the addiction that is fantasy football. From pre-draft hijinx to post-draft trash talk, from tumultuous trades to the perils of free agency, it celebrates the eccentric personalities, absurd rituals, and hilarious superstitions of one of the most fanatical fantasy leagues on earth. With humor, insight, and a dash of advice, Why Fantasy Football Matters celebrates the thirty-two million Americans who prefer managing their fantasy squads to relaxing with loved ones. And it gives girlfriends, coworkers, and sports purists all the proof they need to accept that this is an obsession that really matters.

Download or read book Ensnared The Spider s Mate 1 written by Tiffany Roberts and published by Spider's Mate. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He's spent years as a hunter, but now he's the one ensnared in a creature's trap. Ketahn did not want a mate. Fate has a different plan for him. When the queen he despises declares her intention to claim him, he retreats into the jungle. What he finds there changes his world. Small, delicate, and pale skinned, Ivy Foster is nothing like the females Ketahn has known. She's not of his kind at all. Yet the moment he sees her, he knows the truth in his soul-she is his heartsthread. And now that he has her, he won't let anything take her away. Not the jungle, not the gods, not the queen and her warriors. Whether Ivy agrees or not, their webs are entangled. No one will ever sever those threads. ----- Book 1 of 3 in The Spider's Mate Trilogy. Warning: Contains darker themes and there is also a cliffhanger. Check the author's website for more detailed content warnings.

Download or read book Ultimate Glory written by David Gessner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of obsession, glory, and the wild early days of Ultimate Frisbee. David Gessner devoted his twenties to a cultish sport called Ultimate Frisbee. Like his teammates and rivals, he trained for countless hours, sacrificing his body and potential career for a chance at fleeting glory without fortune or fame. His only goal: to win Nationals and go down in Ultimate history as one of the greatest athletes no one has ever heard of. With humor and raw honesty, Gessner explores what it means to devote one’s life to something that many consider ridiculous. Today, Ultimate is played by millions, but in the 1980s, it was an obscure sport with a (mostly) undeserved stoner reputation. Its early heroes were as scrappy as the sport they loved, driven by fierce competition, intense rivalries, epic parties, and the noble ideals of the Spirit of the Game. Ultimate Glory is a portrait of the artist as a young ruffian. Gessner shares the field and his seemingly insane obsession with a cast of closely knit, larger-than-life characters. As his sport grows up, so does he, and eventually he gives up chasing flying discs to pursue a career as a writer. But he never forgets his love for this misunderstood sport and the rare sense of purpose he attained as a member of its priesthood.

Download or read book Gitty and Kvetch written by Caroline Kusin Pritchard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this hilariously sweet story about an opposites-attract friendship, chock-full of Yiddish humor, a girl and her best bird friend’s perfect day turns into a perfect opportunity to see things differently. Gitty and her feathered-friend Kvetch couldn’t be more different: Gitty always sees the bright side of life, while her curmudgeonly friend Kvetch is always complaining and, well, kvetching about the trouble they get into. One perfect day, Gitty ropes Kvetch into shlepping off on a new adventure to their perfect purple treehouse. Even when Kvetch sees signs of impending doom everywhere, Gitty finds silver linings and holds onto her super special surprise reason for completing their mission. But when her perfect plan goes awry, oy vey, suddenly it’s Gitty who’s down in the dumps. Can Kvetch come out of his funk to lift Gitty’s spirits back up?

Download or read book Basketball written by Jackie MacMullan and published by Crown. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Inspired by a major ESPN film series, this is an extraordinary oral history of basketball—its eye-opening untold history, its profound deeper meaning, its transformative influence on the world—as told through an unprecedented series of candid conversations with the game’s ultimate icons. This is the greatest love story never told. It has passion and heartbreak, triumph and betrayal. It is deeply intimate yet crosses oceans, upends lives and changes nations. This is the true story of basketball. It is the story of a Canadian invention that took over America, and the world. Of a supposed “white man’s sport” that became a way for people of color, women, and immigrants to claim a new place in society. Of a game that demands everything of those who love it, yet gives so much back in return. To tell this story, acclaimed journalists Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew and Dan Klores embarked on a groundbreaking mission to interview a staggering lineup of basketball trailblazers. For the first time hundreds of legends, from Kobe, Lebron and Steph Curry to Magic Johnson, Dr. J and Jerry West, spoke movingly about their greatest passion. Former NBA commissioner David Stern and iconic coaches like Phil Jackson and Coach K opened up like never before. Those who shattered glass ceilings, from Bill Russell and Yao Ming to Cheryl Miller and Lisa Leslie, explained what it really took to lay claim to their place in the game. At once a definitive oral history and something far more revelatory and life affirming, Basketball: A Love Story is the defining untold oral history of how basketball came to be, and what it means to those who love it.

Download or read book Shawn Thornton written by Shawn Thornton and published by Triumph Books. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A refreshing memoir of battles and self-belief from one of the NHL's most revered enforcers Shawn Thornton was an unlikely NHL success, to say the least. The Oshawa, Ontario native was picked late in the OHL and later thought he was being pranked when the Toronto Maple Leafs called him to say he'd been selected in the seventh round of the 1997 NHL draft. After years spent working and maturing in the AHL, Thornton would go on to play 14 seasons with the Chicago Blackhawks, Anaheim Ducks, Boston Bruins, and Florida Panthers, winning two Stanley Cups along the way. For the first time, in this candid memoir, Thornton opens up about his life in hockey and beyond, from his early days as an unrated prospect to the leadership lessons he learned in the minors, from the most difficult on-ice brawls to the ecstasy of reaching the sport's most celestial heights. Fans will not want to miss this story of perseverance and finding one's own path.

Download or read book Slow Getting Up written by Nate Jackson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-09-02 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One man's odyssey into the brutal hive of the National Football League As an unsigned free agent who rose through the practice squad to the starting lineup of the Denver Broncos, Nate Jackson took the path of thousands of unknowns before him to carve out a professional football career twice as long as the average player. Through his story recounted here—from scouting combines to preseason cuts to byzantine film studies to glorious touchdown catches—even knowledgeable football fans will glean a new, starkly humanized understanding of the NFL's workweek. Fast-paced, lyrical, dirty, and hilariously unvarnished, Slow Getting Up is an unforgettable look at the real lives of America's best athletes putting their bodies and minds through hell.

Download or read book The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL written by Sean McIndoe and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sean McIndoe of Down Goes Brown, one of hockey's favourite and funniest writers, takes aim at the game's most memorable moments--especially if they're memorable for the wrong reasons--in this warts-and-all history of the NHL. The NHL is, indisputably, weird. One moment, you're in awe of the speed, skill and intensity that define the sport, shaking your head as a player makes an impossible play, or shatters a longstanding record, or sobs into his first Stanley Cup. The next, everyone's wearing earmuffs, Mr. Rogers has shown up, and guys in yellow raincoats are officiating playoff games while everyone tries to figure out where the league president went. That's just life in the NHL, a league that often can't seem to get out of its own way. No matter how long you've been a hockey fan, you know that sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, some of the people in charge here don't actually know what they're doing. And at some point, you've probably wondered: Has it always been this way? The short answer is yes. As for the longer answer, well, that's this book. In this fun, irreverent and fact-filled history, Sean McIndoe relates the flip side to the National Hockey League's storied past. His obsessively detailed memory combines with his keen sense for the absurdities that make you shake your head at the league and yet fanatically love the game, allowing you to laugh even when your team is the butt of the joke (and as a life-long Leafs fan, McIndoe takes the brunt of some of his own best zingers). The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL is the weird and wonderful league's story told as only Sean McIndoe can.

Download or read book The Residue Years written by Mitchell S. Jackson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner Whiting Writers' Award Winner Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that's nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.

Download or read book Showtime written by Jeff Pearlman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of Sweetness delivers the first all-encompassing account of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, one of professional sports’ most-revered—and dominant—dynasties. The Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s personified the flamboyance and excess of the decade over which they reigned. Beginning with the arrival of Earvin “Magic” Johnson as the number-one overall pick of the 1979 draft, the Lakers played basketball with gusto and pizzazz, unleashing their famed “Showtime” run-and-gun style on a league unprepared for their speed and ferocity—and became the most captivating show in sports and, arguably, in all-around American entertainment. The Lakers’ roster overflowed with exciting all-star-caliber players, including center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and they were led by the incomparable Pat Riley, known for his slicked-back hair, his Armani suits, and his arrogant strut. Hollywood’s biggest celebrities lined the court and gorgeous women flocked to the arena. Best of all, the team was a winner. Between 1980 and 1991, the Lakers played in an unmatched nine NBA championship series, capturing five of them. Bestselling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost three hundred interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era. A dazzling account of one of America’s greatest sports sagas, Showtime is packed with indelible characters, vicious rivalries, and jaw-dropping, behind-the-scenes stories of the players’ decadent Hollywood lifestyles. From the Showtime era’s remarkable rise to its tragic end—marked by Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement that he had contracted HIV—Showtime is a gripping narrative of sports, celebrity, and 1980s-style excess.

Download or read book Passion Betrayal And Killer Highlights written by Kyra Davis and published by Red Dress Ink. This book was released on 2006-05-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *

Download or read book Crap Taxidermy written by Kat Su and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous look at what happens when taxidermy goes terribly wrong, by the founder of the hit website crappytaxidermy.com. A relaxed toad enjoying a smoke and a brew. A cat with eerily flexible front legs. A smiling lion with receding gums. Whether you choose to laugh or cringe at these spectacularly bad attempts at taxidermy, you won't be able to tear your eyes away from the curiosities inside. This volume brings together the very best of the worst (along with a DIY "Stuff Your Own Mouse" lesson by an Insect Preparator from the American Museum of Natural History), showcasing the most perverse yet imaginative anatomical reconstructions of the animal kingdom you'll ever see.

Download or read book Shaken written by Tim Tebow and published by Waterbrook Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tim Tebow discusses what he has learned from the highs and lows of his career with the NFL, along with sharing wisdom from Scripture and stories of people who have impacted his life.

Download or read book Unbroken written by Laura Hillenbrand and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE • Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will. Appearing in paperback for the first time—with twenty arresting new photos and an extensive Q&A with the author—Unbroken is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit, brought vividly to life by Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. Hailed as the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Indies Choice Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award “Extraordinarily moving . . . a powerfully drawn survival epic.”—The Wall Street Journal “[A] one-in-a-billion story . . . designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.”—New York “Staggering . . . mesmerizing . . . Hillenbrand’s writing is so ferociously cinematic, the events she describes so incredible, you don’t dare take your eyes off the page.”—People “A meticulous, soaring and beautifully written account of an extraordinary life.”—The Washington Post “Ambitious and powerful . . . a startling narrative and an inspirational book.”—The New York Times Book Review “Magnificent . . . incredible . . . [Hillenbrand] has crafted another masterful blend of sports, history and overcoming terrific odds; this is biography taken to the nth degree, a chronicle of a remarkable life lived through extraordinary times.”—The Dallas Morning News “An astonishing testament to the superhuman power of tenacity.”—Entertainment Weekly “A tale of triumph and redemption . . . astonishingly detailed.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[A] masterfully told true story . . . nothing less than a marvel.”—Washingtonian “[Hillenbrand tells this] story with cool elegance but at a thrilling sprinter’s pace.”—Time “Hillenbrand [is] one of our best writers of narrative history. You don’t have to be a sports fan or a war-history buff to devour this book—you just have to love great storytelling.”—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Download or read book Dynasties written by Marcus Thompson II and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed sports journalist Marcus Thompson explores the 10 teams that transformed basketball in this illustrated history of the sport. What turns a winning team into a dynasty? According to many, legitimate dynasties are teams that not only won two or more titles but combine personality, superstar talent, and consistent winning seasons. They are teams that you either love or love to hate. While basketball dynasties have been talked about in sports media circles-especially over the last few months-there isn't been a book that explores these top teams in basketball history. Dynasties features 10 winning teams that redefined the sport in their own way. Organized by dynasty beginning with the Minnesota Lakers (1948-1954) and ending with the Warriors (2015-the present), the book tells the story of each team with player and coach profiles (including some of the sports all-time greats: Johnson, Bird, Jordan, Abdul-Jabbar, O'Neal, Curry), key games, playing styles and tactics, controversies, and more. Also featured are teams and players that were frequent rivals to dynasty teams (such as LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers), teams that could have been dynasties, and possible future dynasties.

Download or read book Gadsby written by Ernest Vincent Wright and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gadsby is a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. A fading fictitious city known as Branton Hills is rejuvenated due to the efforts of central character John Gadsby and a youth organizer. A humorous read!

Download or read book The TB12 Method written by Tom Brady and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestseller by the 6-time Super Bowl champion The first book by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady--the 6-time Super Bowl champion who is still reaching unimaginable heights of excellence at 42 years old--a gorgeously illustrated and deeply practical "athlete's bible" that reveals Brady's revolutionary approach to sustained peak performance for athletes of all kinds and all ages. In modern sports, some athletes have managed to transcend their competition in a way that no one will ever forget: Jordan. Jeter. Ali. Williams. These elite legends have changed the game, achieved the unthinkable, and pushed their bodies to unbelievable limits. Joining their exclusive ranks is Tom Brady. "Brady is the healthiest great champion the NFL has ever had, both physically and mentally" (Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post). The longtime New England Patriots quarterback, who in 2017 achieved his fifth Super Bowl win and fourth Super Bowl MVP award, is widely regarded as an athlete whose training and determination pushed him from a mediocre draft position to the most-revered and respected professional football player of his generation. In The TB12 Method, Tom Brady explains how he developed his groundbreaking approach to long-term fitness, presenting a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to his personal practice. Brady offers the principles behind pliability, which is at the heart of a new paradigm shift and movement toward a more natural, healthier way of exercising, training, and living--and one that challenges some commonly held assumptions around health and wellness. Filled with lessons learned from Brady's own peak performance training, and step-by-step action steps to help readers develop and maintain their own peak performance, The TB12 Method also advocates for more effective approaches to strength training, hydration, nutrition, supplementation, cognitive fitness, recovery, and other lifestyle choices that dramatically decrease the risk of injury while amplifying and extending performance, as well as quality of life. After using his methods for over a decade, Brady believes that the TB12 approach has made him--and can make any athlete, male or female, in any sport and at any level--achieve their own peak performance. With instructions, drills, photos, in-depth case studies that Brady himself has used, as well as personal anecdotes and experiences from on and off the field, The TB12 Method is the only book an athlete will ever need, a playbook from Brady himself that will change the game.