The Best
Baddest Man by Mark Kriegel (Ebury, €19.99)
Every once in a while a sports book comes along that makes you laugh and goggle and puff your cheeks, sometimes in awe, sometimes in revulsion. This year, that book in this small corner of the playground is Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, a book so compelling it will have you rushing through other things in your day to make time for it.
The elevator pitch here is Mike Tyson’s life up to the night he became world heavyweight champion by beating Michael Spinks in June 1988. Nothing about it is ordinary or linear or often even agreed upon. Tyson is one of those outsize characters of American life whose story keeps blurring that little bit further with ceaseless retelling. Kriegel’s is the best attempt yet at cutting through it all.
It is immaculately researched – the interviews, notes and bibliography section at the end runs to almost 40 pages – but this is no dry piece of academia. It reads in parts like a pulp novel, populated by some of the most gruesome, fascinating characters any fiction writer could conceive. The likes of Cus D’Amato, Teddy Atlas, Don King, even 1980s Donald Trump – they’re all in here, all appalling in their own ways, all drivers of the shameless hustle that came with Tyson’s ascent.
And yet none of them is even a fraction as interesting as Tyson himself, the feral child out of Brooklyn, the born criminal whose life was equal parts saved and ruined by boxing, who chased the fame and money his talent would bring and ultimately became a victim of it all. When the book ends, he is still three days short of his 22nd birthday. His story was only starting and he had already packed so much into it.
RM Block
An astonishing life. An incredible book.
Touching Distance by Brendan Fanning (Gill Books, €18.99)
The best book about Irish rugby in years. Probably, indeed, since Brendan Fanning’s original offering in 2007, From There to Here. This is his follow-up, taking us from the 2007 World Cup to the modern day, stopping along the way at all levels from schools to provinces to the international set-up.
This is an MRI scan for Irish rugby. How it works, why things are the way they are, what are the gravitational forces preventing them being another way. Fanning was on the beat as one of the press corps’ longest-standing rugby writers throughout, meaning that as well as building up no end of contacts through the years, he is also long enough in the tooth to be well past caring about ruffling feathers.
So there are no sacred cows here. He winkles extensive and insightful interviews from the likes of Joe Schmidt, David Nucifora, Mick Dawson, David Humphreys and others (on and off the record) without taking what any of them say as gospel. He goes deep into the schools game that is providing so many players to the Leinster academy and onwards, while also breaking down in stark terms why that model isn’t working elsewhere.
In the wrong hands, a project like this could feel dry and worthy and a bit like eating your greens. But Fanning’s writing is reliably jaundiced and entertaining, which elevates the whole thing. Throughout the book, it feels like you’re being led around Irish rugby by a tour guide who’s been on the job for years and knows how to give punters the real story beyond the brochure. An essential text, for everyone from the devoted to the mildly curious.
The Dodger by Eimear Ní Bhraonáin (Merrion Press, €16.99)
Even now, even after the court case and the victim impact statements and the five-and-a-half-year sentence, even with all that a matter of public record, it’s still sometimes hard to fathom the scale of DJ Carey’s deceptions. There’s still a surreal element to it all, as if it seems just too fantastical that DJ Carey – the DJ Carey – lived the grubby life of a swindler preying on ordinary people for so long.
Eimear Ní Bhraonáin’s excellent book cuts through all of that. She is precise and forensic in the telling of Carey’s story from the schoolboy idol to the superstar hurler, from the moderately successful businessman of the 1990s to the lowdown conman he became. This is a tragic story and Ní Bhraonáin leaves nobody in any doubt that the tragedy belongs to Carey’s victims.
There are parts of the book that will make the reader gasp at the sheer neck involved in keeping Carey’s fraud going for so long. Yet the true strength of the narrative is that none of it is gratuitous or puerile or rubbernecking. There is plenty of anger, yes, but you’d struggle to contend that any of it is over-the-top or unjustified.
It’s a brilliant piece of investigative journalism and a fitting document for one of the saddest stories in Irish sport.
Inside by Boris Becker and Tom Fordyce (HarperCollins, €17.99)
What happens when a famous person goes to jail? What happens when that person is a famous sportsman, someone who has been a multimillionaire, someone who has dined with kings, queens and presidents yet doesn’t know how to boil a kettle for coffee? The answer, if Boris Becker’s account is anything to go by, is the same bad stuff that happens to everybody else.
In 2022, Boris Becker served just short of eight months in two separate prisons in England, his punishment after he was found guilty of hiding £2.5m from his debtors. This book, brilliantly constructed by Tom Fordyce, opens on his first night in Wandsworth jail and takes you through the 231 days he spent there and in another English prison called Huntercombe before he was released and then deported to Germany.
In a lot of ways, Becker is not that sympathetic a character. His explanation of his crime seems pretty wishy-washy, putting it down to bad advice from lawyers. And though it genuinely rings true that he was treated no differently to any of the other prisoners, he was still able to fall back on a much better life than them – he was deported on a private jet provided as a favour by a wealthy friend, for instance.
That said, you overwhelmingly find yourself rooting for him here. He is so obviously out of his depth in jail, particularly in those early few weeks when he has no idea who to trust, where to go, what to say. He discovers stoicism in prison and comes out of it a changed man, devoted to a new life with his partner Lilian, who is far and away the hero of the book.
The Race by David Gillick and Cathal Dennehy (Gill Books, €19.99)
More and more, it is becoming obvious that the best way to write a sports autobiography is to leave it a while. David Gillick retired from athletics in 2016 and has lived a couple of lives in the time since, enough for him to have begun to make some sort of sense of it all. This book feels like the work of a man who was ready to tell a story, which isn’t always the case.
Expertly steered by Cathal Dennehy, Gillick essentially has three strands to weave into one here. Growing up, he was a talented sportsman without anyone really marking him out as a future Olympian, Irish record holder or anything like that. At the height of his career, he was on the edge of the truly big-time, yet he didn’t get out of his heat at the 2008 Olympics. In retirement, he struggled for years to find purpose and identity before coming out the other side.
All of that is in here, with a constant backing track of mental struggles. Gillick lived so much in his head through his ups and downs that some of this can nearly feel intrusive. Ultimately, even at its rawest, this never feels like a slog. We never really know what sportspeople are going through – this is as enlightening an insight as you’ll find.
The Last Bell by Donald McRae (Simon & Schuster, €16.99)
This isn’t quite a sequel to Dark Trade, Donald McRae’s 1996 classic journey into the heart of boxing’s black hole. But it’s fishing in the same deep, murky waters, and, three decades on, there’s even less hope now of gathering anything worthwhile into the nets.
McRae is best known for his sports interviews in the Guardian, but he has never made any secret of the fact that boxing is the sport that colonises his thoughts in a way the others can’t and don’t. This is his last book on the fight game and he interrogates it from the bottom to the top and back again.
Throughout, he has a kind of doomed love for it all. All the greed and destruction brought about by the Kinahans and the Saudis and everything else can still fall away when he’s ringside as Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano go at it. He can be repulsed by the doping and the lies and cupidity and still find the beauty in the journeyman stories of fighters such as Patrick Day and Isaac Chamberlain.
The push and pull between these viscerally held emotions provides the tension. McRae’s brilliant writing does the rest.
Old Parish by Ciarán Murphy (Penguin, €16.99)
There aren’t enough of these books. Ciarán Murphy – him off Second Captains, him off The Irish Times sports pages every Thursday – took it upon himself to do that thing that sports journalists often talk about but never get around to. That is to say, he threw himself into the madman’s ballet of participatory journalism.
The result is a lovely, warm-hearted story about what it’s like to take up hurling in your 40s. Murphy has been broadcasting and writing about the sport for two decades yet, like plenty of us in the trade, he never had much more than the odd puckabout in the park to show for it. This book is about what happens when you try to play a famously skilful, technical sport when you have no skills or technique to speak of.
But it’s about more than that, too. He takes up with a tiny club in Waterford, the club of his father and uncles before him. So it becomes a story about connection, ageing and life choices as well. All of it shot through with Murphy’s natural charm and self-deprecation. The whole thing is a delight.
The Rest
This should be said straight out: the standard of sports book this year is a cut above. Normally on this page “The Best” category has a maximum of five books but this year none of the seven could be left out. And there are others below who would comfortably have made it in other years.
The Last Ditch by Eamonn Sweeney (Headline, €17.99), for instance, is the Irish/Sunday Independent columnist’s follow-up to his classic 2004 book, The Road to Croker. While it doesn’t cover the same amount of geographical ground, there’s a very good reason for this. Sweeney’s travel phobia became so acute over the years that he couldn’t bring himself to go anywhere outside of where he lived in west Cork.
And so this book is to all intents and purposes a journey of discovery, in which Sweeney convinces himself, gradually and doughtily, to pluck up the gumption to follow the 2024 GAA championship around the country. It is an older, slower-paced, more soulful book than the first one. Well worth the time, too.
Sticking with the world of GAA, More than a Game by Michael Moynihan (Gill Books, €15.99) is a comprehensive check-up of all things to do with the big kahuna of Irish sporting organisations. Moynihan sat in GAA press boxes long enough to be conversant in every last one of the debating points that keep the whole caravan moving along and he dives deeply into them here.
Elsewhere, Ó Sé by Marc Ó Sé and Adrian Russell (Gill Books, €17.99) is the main GAA autobiography of the year, an enjoyable account of the career of the youngest of the west Kerry brothers. And The GAA Covered by John Kelly (Gill Books, €24.99) is a truly gorgeous compendium of a century of GAA match programmes, a Herculean piece of work.
The best rugby autobiography this year is Heart on My Sleeve by Andrew Porter and Alison Walsh (Eriu, €21.99), in which the Leinster prop lays bare everything in his off-field life as well as some stuff on it. The grief over his mother’s death the week he started secondary school, his eating disorder in his teens and his ADHD, Andrew Porter goes deep into all of it.
Cloud Nine by Conor Murray and Tommy Conlon (Reach Sport, €21.99) is more interesting from an on-field point of view, particularly when it comes to getting a sense of what has gone wrong at Munster over the past decade. Conor Murray lived through the ups and downs of one of the great Ireland careers, pickled with a generally frustrating time with his province. He doesn’t pull any punches here. The Only Way I Know by Andy Farrell and Gavin Mairs (Penguin, €24.99) is his former boss’s account of an extraordinary sporting career, one that is far from over yet.
The last book to mention in the rugby sphere isn’t really a sports book. But there is a crucial sporting aspect to Aftermath by Bláthnaid Raleigh (Gill Books, €16.99). Raleigh was raped by club rugby player Johnny Moran in July 2019 and this is a gripping account of everything that flowed from that night, including her brother having to leave Mullingar rugby club because of it. A harrowing, vital read.
On the soccer front, there are a couple of heavyweight World Cup books worth picking up in advance of festivities across the Atlantic next year. The Power and the Glory by Jonathan Wilson (Hachette, €24.99) is a sumptuous history of the World Cup, as much as a social and political phenomenon as a sporting one. Different, if not completely different, is World Cup Fever by Simon Kuper (Profile Books, €20), a personal history of the World Cup by one of the very few people on earth who can claim to have attended every tournament since 1990.
If you like your focus a bit more personal, We Made It, Kid by Jackie McCarthy O’Brien (Eriu, €16.99) is the often jaw-dropping autobiography of Ireland’s first mixed-race soccer and rugby international, taking her from an industrial school to the top of two different sports, encountering racism and sexual harassment along the way.
On a more global scale, Keegan by Anthony Quinn (Faber & Faber, €14.99) is a quirky, freewheeling and riotously entertaining yomp through the life of Kevin Keegan, one of the great forgotten figures of English football.
There are a couple of horse racing offers that shouldn’t be missed this year. National Hunt and Point-to-Point Racing in Ireland by Frances Nolan (Four Courts Press, €26.95) is a monumental piece of history, charting the sport in Ireland from its origins to the modern day. A must for every racing household. And Sacrifice by Oisin Murphy and James Hogg (Bantam Press, €15.99) is a bracingly honest account of the champion jockey’s 2024 season, one in which the Killarney man doesn’t spare himself or his turbulent life.
The Escape by Pippa York and David Walsh (Mudlark, €24.99) took the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize during the week. Safe to say there’s never been a sports book like it – part memoir, part travelogue, part Tour De France hagiography, part gender studies primer. Fight of My Life by Owen Ryan (Hero Books, €16) is a fantastic collection of interviews with 24 Irish boxers about the one fight they’ll remember above all others.
And to see us out, A Season of Sundays 2025 (Sportsfile, €29.95) is into its 29th year and the quality hasn’t let up. Ray McManus’s team of photographers keep delivering and this year David Clifford has his arms outstretched on the front. Who else would you have?
