How snooker star Willie Thorne found the bottom of life's deepest pocket but climbed out again

SNOOKER BOOKS

Willie Thorne: Taking A Punt On My Life

Published by Vision Sports Publishing

What’s it about?

At the peak of his fame, former snooker star Willie Thorne led a life that presented him pretty much as a walking caricature. A leading player during snooker’s boom years in the 1980s, he did everything that the media wanted from the central characters of their new back page soap opera.

He worked hard at the table and partied hard away from it; he made good money from his skill with a cue and if it didn’t last him long there was plenty more where it had come from as sponsors and television executives queued up for a piece of the action. He revelled in his celebrity, indulged his hangers-on and when there was female attention to be enjoyed he was not inclined to resist.

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Glamour and danger of great track rivalries take top ranks on the grid in motor racing books

Sports books for Christmas


Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of motor sport books published this year: 


The Limit: Life and Death in Formula One's Most Dangerous Era, by Michael Cannell (Atlantic Books)

When Dan Wheldon, the English Indycar racing driver, was killed in a spectacular crash in Las Vegas in October, the story made headlines in British newspapers, mainly because fatalities are nowadays relatively rare in motor racing.  

The Limit looks at an era when such tragedies were almost expected. Focusing on 1961, it specifically examines the battle between Ferrari drivers Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips for the Formula One world championship, a battle quite literally fought to the death.

Hill and Von Trips had risen to the top of their profession from very different roots, the former a college drop-out from California who worked as a mechanic to finance his desire to race, the latter from a family with a castle just outside Cologne, a debonair socialite with a taste for nightclubs -- acutely different from Hill, an intense man plagued by stomach ulcers who preferred to spend his evenings in his hotel room, listening to Bartók and Shostakovich on a primitive tape recorder.

Hill was striving to become the first American to win the title, Von Trips the first for Germany.  Their rivalry came to a head at the Italian grand prix at Monza, a course featuring a notoriously dangerous high-speed banked oval on which the drivers would bunch together at speeds of up to 180mph, riding in the slipstream before deciding their moment to pull out and overtake.

Monza had a high count of casualties and while it was by no means the only circuit with a reputation for loss of life --  significant fatalities also occurred at the Nurburgring, Spa and Rheims -- it was Monza that would claim another victim in 1961, when Von Trips lost control of his car and collided with the British driver Jim Clark, spinning off the track and into the crowd, taking 15 spectators to the grave with him. Yet there was no abandoning the race, even as the bodies of the dead were being removed, and Hill went on to win to take the title.

The Limit, written by the American magazine journalist Michael Cannell, is both a gripping and grim account that captures a world of seductive glamour and ever-present danger. The Limit was how drivers described the perfect balance of speed and control that they would try to attain, knowing that to fall short ran the risk of failure but that to go beyond ‘the limit’ was to dice with death.

In the Name of Glory - 1976: The Greatest Ever Sporting Duel, by Tom Rubython (Myrtle Press)

A motor racing rivalry no less fierce but in which happily there were no casualties is the subject of the latest offering from the British author Tom Rubython, a writer and publisher from Northamptonshire whose previous work includes biographies of Ayrton Senna and James Hunt.

Rubython studies the intense and sometimes bitter battle between Hunt and defending champion Niki Lauda for the F1 drivers’ crown in 1976, one in which Ferrari's lawyers issued a series of writs challenging the legitimacy of Hunt‘s victories, on grounds ranging from the width of Hunt’s McLaren car to the composition of the fuel he was using.

It was also the year in which Lauda suffered his most horrific crash, at the Nurburgring, where he sustained severe burns to his head and neck that left him horribly scarred for life yet returned to the track after only six weeks, missing just two races.  Hunt, whose career had been in sharp decline 12 months previously, clawed back the lead Lauda had established by winning five races before his accident and took the title when Lauda -- much to Ferrari’s frustration -- decided that the soaking conditions at the final race of the season, in Japan, were too dangerous.

No Angel: The Secret Life of Bernie Ecclestone, by Tom Bower (Faber & Faber)

Tom Bower, a biographer author with a long experience of controversial subjects that has seen Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, Mohammed al Fayed, Conrad Black and Richard Branson come into his sights, saw in billionaire motor racing boss Bernie Ecclestone another with the same ruthless instincts.

This story follows Ecclestone from his days as a playground entrepreneur -- who would buy buns with the proceeds of his two morning paper rounds and sell them on to classmates at a profit -- to the head of Formula One who negotiated a deal with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to secure $280 million dollars of Russian government money to stage a grand prix in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Bower makes a brave attempt to dissect the increasingly complicated business manoeuvres that accompanied a rise to power that began with his purchase of the Brabham team in 1971 and by which he has been able to maintain his grip as president and chief executive of F1’s governing bodies.

He also exposes the shady machinations of New Labour that involved Tony Blair, Michael Levy, Peter Mandelson, Derry Irvine and Gordon Brown in helping Ecclestone and F1 maintain their sponsorship income from tobacco companies despite a ban on their involvement with sport.

Red Bull Racing F1 Car Manual, by Steve Rendle (J H Haynes & Co)

A clever book presented in the graphical style and hardback format of the legendary Haynes workshop manuals, Steve Rendle’s book provides an insight, as its sub-title indicates, into the ‘technology, engineering, maintenance and operation of the world championship-winning Red Bull Racing RB6’ but a lot more.

Its 180 pages cover a wide range of topics, not least the background to the Red Bull team.  Not a workshop manual in the conventional sense -- not that there are too many enthusiasts with an RB6 to tinker with, anyway -- it has been described as more a summary of contemporary F1 technology from the past three years.


Steve Rendle is a life-long motor racing enthusiast and a member of the Guild of Motoring Writers. He has worked for Haynes Publishing for 25 years, and has written over 50 Haynes car manuals and practical technical books.

Memories of Senna: Anecdotes and Insights from Those Who Knew Him, by Christopher Hilton (J H Haynes & Co)

Christopher Hilton, the former Daily Express journalist who wrote the first biography of Ayrton Senna and subsequently penned five more books on the great Brazilian driver, went back to 120 people who knew him, worked with him and competed against him with a single question: what is your strongest memory of Senna?

The result, told entirely in direct quotes, stands as an intimate, heartfelt portrait of the man, from his early days as a karter to his death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.

Senna -- three times F1 world champion -- had an aura that still provokes emotion even 17 years after his death. Memories of Senna is a re-release of a collection first published in 2003 but loses no impact for that, recalling Senna’s talent, religious faith, intellect and professionalism and his extraordinary ability to monitor his car‘s performance and behaviour even as he raced, long before the technological advances that allow such analysis to be carried out remotely by team technicians via computer screens.

Sadly, after a life in writing that yielded more than 60 books, Christopher Hilton died just over a year ago.  This volume serves in part as a tribute to his career as well as that of his subject.


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The world's fastest man and the greatest Welsh all-rounder jostle for position on athletics wish list

Sports books for Christmas


Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of athletics books published this year: 


Usain Bolt: The Story of the World's Fastest Man, by Steven Downes (SportsBooks)

Considering that he was largely unknown, at least outside the world of track and field, until the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the speed with which Usain Bolt has risen to become to the best known athlete has been extraordinary.

Yet the experts knew what was coming long before the rest of us, among them the athletics writer Steven Downes, who was told to remember the name when he interviewed Bolt at the 2003 world youth championships, after he had won the 200m in a competition record time.

Downes has followed Bolt’s career ever since, watching him establish a permanent place in the record books by winning an unprecedented gold medal hat-trick in the 100 metres, 200 metres and sprint relay, all in world record times, at the Beijing Games, then becoming the first man to hold the Olympic and World 100m and 200m titles simultaneously when he won both at the World Championships in Berlin in 2009, where he ran the 100m in 9.58 seconds, the fastest to date.

Bolt would surely have retained all of those titles had disqualification for a false start in the 100m at this year’s World Championships in Daegu, where he recovered his sangfroid to successfully defend his 200m crown before anchoring the Jamaican 4x100 metres team to victory in the relay, again in a world record time.  Now Bolt is a box office draw like none ever seen, so much so that the 100m final at next year’s London Olympics attracted more than one million ticket applications.

Downes, former editor of Athletics Weekly, has written a fascinating life story that explains how Bolt’s destiny was changed when his time for the 100m at a minor meeting in Crete in 2007 convinced him that the financial rewards being accrued by his compatriot, the then 100m world champion Asafa Powell, could be at his command, too. It was Powell’s world record of 9.74 seconds that the 6ft 5ins Bolt beat when he clocked 9.72 seconds on a blustery New York evening in May 2008, a mark he has since bettered twice.

Running With Fire: The True Story of Chariots of Fire Hero Harold Abrahams, by Mark Ryan (JR Books)

Author Mark Ryan recalls a chance encounter with Usain Bolt in his introduction to what is a fine biography of the man sometimes called the father of modern sprinting, the British athlete who won the 100m gold at the Paris Olympics of 1924, a performance immortalised in the award-winning movie, Chariots of Fire.

It was a meeting -- during the 2009 World Championships in Berlin -- that made Bolt aware that if he wanted to know more about the history of the event he had made his own, then Harold Abrahams was a character he needed to learn about. At the time, he had never heard of him.

He could do no worse than read Ryan’s book, which tells the Abrahams life story for the first time, describing not only his deeds on the track but his influence on the development of athletics as administrator and journalist, in which roles he helped raise the profile of the sport enormously, helping it attain the status that has turned the likes of Usain Bolt into major sports stars.

Ryan’s research shone fresh light on Abrahams’s  controversial involvement with Roger Bannister’s historic first sub-four minute mile and reveals the engaging details of his courtship and marriage to the opera singer, Sybil Evers, a romance which gives the story a wonderful sub-plot.

Read more about Running With Fire

Gold Rush: What Makes an Olympic Champion?, by Michael Johnson (HarperSport)

The 200m world record that Usain Bolt broke at the 2008 Beijing Olympics had for 12 years been the property of Michael Johnson, whose tracks career brought him four Olympic and nine World Championship gold medals, including the unique 200m-400m double at Atlanta in 1996.

Johnson has since become a respected broadcaster and commentator as well as a top-class coach and motivational speaker.

He has drawn on his huge experience in all these areas to present Gold Rush, an analysis of what it takes to win an Olympic gold medal that made the long list for this year’s William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

Johnson conducted interviews with Bolt, Carl Lewis, Sally Gunnell, Seb Coe, Daley Thompson, Cathy Freeman, Ian Thorpe, Michael Phelps, Rebecca Adlington, Chris Hoy, Steve Redgrave, Matthew Pinsent, Lennox Lewis and Michael Jordan among others in his attempt to find common characteristics.

And of course he is able to throw into the mix his own considerable knowledge of what it takes to be a winner, for example describing why he developed his trademark upright running style and how the disappointment of failing to qualify as favourite for the 200m final at Barcelona in 1992 gave him the motivational drive to win in Atlanta.

The John Carlos Story, by John Carlos and Dave Zirin (Haymarket Books) 

John Carlos is another 200m specialist but an athlete who made headlines not through his times on the track but because of the ground-shaking moment at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico when he and fellow American Tommie Smith, who had won gold in the 200m final in which Carlos took bronze, raised black-gloved fists on the podium in what became known as a black power salute.

The gesture, condemned by the athletics authorities but praised by many supporters, including the white Australian silver medal-winner Peter Norman, was seen at the time as a spontaneous act but in this autobiography, written in conjunction with American journalist Dave Zirin, Carlos shows that it was long in the planning, certainly on his part. The black gloves, the bare feet and the beads he and Smith wore around their necks were all symbols taken from an early life coloured by his refusal to accept the injustices that encompassed the African American experience.

As a boy growing up in the New York black ghetto in Harlem, Carlos would steal food from freight trains and hand it out to the poor like a Robin Hood of his age, feeling that his neighbours had been swallowed up and cast adrift by an unfair system. These experiences, combined with the personal hurt of having to give up his dream of becoming an Olympic swimmer as a result of racist attitudes, instilled in him a passion to help others reach their dreams that he carries forward even today as a high school track and field coach in California.   Following a philosophy based on the premise that ‘power concedes nothing without demand‘, Carlos was fighting for justice long before 1968.

Zirin, a Sports Illustrated columnist and editor of the liberal American political journal The Nation, has helped Carlos tell a compelling story of which the black power salute was only one detail.

The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop, by Bill Jones (Mainstream)

John Tarrant earned notoriety of a different kind in Britain in the 1950s and 60s when he became known as The Ghost Runner, emerging from the crowds at high-profile long-distance running events to join and often win the race. Press photographers flocked to such events, knowing his appearance would guarantee them a front-page picture.

But his appearances were more than a stunt.  Tarrant had dreamed of being an Olympic athlete and wanted to join Salford Harriers, hoping it would lead to a place in the Great Britain marathon team at the Rome Olympics in 1960. But his application to join the club was turned down and banned from competing because he had earned the paltry sum of £17 for taking part in boxing matches as a teenager, an admission he made out of instinctive honesty, unaware it would provoke such harsh and non-negotiable punishment.

His life then became focused on delivering a bitter message to the blazered officials at the Amateur Athletics Association, still dominated by a wealthy Oxbridge elite, that they were wrong and had condemned a great running talent to go to waste.

Tarrant died of cancer in 1975, aged only 42, and his story might have slipped away had Bill Jones, who was making a television documentary about working class runners in Manchester, not been handed a copy of a slim autobiography Tarrant had written himself before he died.  Jones was intrigued by the man and the story, which formed the basis for an engaging book, was short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award.

Ken Jones: Boots and Spikes, by Steve Lewis (SportsBooks)

The name of Ken Jones may not echo with quite the same resonance as some of the above but as an all-round sportsman he is regarded by some, particularly in his native Wales, as peerless.

Not only was Jones an accomplished rugby union international, winning 44 Welsh caps and representing the British Lions 17 times, he also had a career as a sprint athlete, at the peak of which he won an Olympic silver medal as a member of the British 4 x 100m relay team at the 1948 Games in London.

For many years he successfully, and seemingly almost effortlessly, he combined the two.  He was a fixture in the Welsh team between 1947-56 yet captained Britain’s athletics team at the European Games in Berne, where he won a silver medal, and ran for Wales in the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver in 1954, winning a bronze, having the previous year scored a memorable try to help Wales beat the All Blacks at Cardiff Arms Park.

Welsh rugby historian Steve Lewis has put together a thoroughly researched book that also highlights the standards in behaviour with which Jones and his contemporaries complied and which seem alien to so many modern stars, particularly in rugby.  Lewis writes how players would embark on long sea voyages -- Jones sailed to New Zealand with the Lions in 1950 -- and pass their time engaged in “…whist drives, brains trusts and quizzes.”

In the words of one reviewer, reading Boots and Spikes -- another notable work given life by the astute Cheltenham publisher Randall Northam under his SportsBooks imprint --  was “like stumbling upon an unexpected delight.”

More books by Steven Downes
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Great players, founding fathers, island hopping and a treasure trove of trivia on the golf lover's wish list

Sports books for Christmas


Scratching your head for a Christmas gift idea? Let The Sports Bookshelf guide you through the maze of possibilities to make the right choice. Here's our selection of golf books published this year: 


The 100 Greatest Ever Golfers, by Andy Farrell (Elliott & Thompson)

Golf writer Andy Farrell afforded himself a self-congratulatory Tweet after Tiger Woods followed Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood in taking the weekend headlines with their tournament wins in California, Hong Kong and South Africa.

All three figure in Farrell’s choices for The 100 Greatest Ever Golfers, a fascinating book that serves not only as a celebration of the finest exponents of the game since the first Open Championship in 1860 but also provides a bite-sized history of championship golf.

Farrell, formerly golf correspondent for the Independent and Independent on Sunday titles and now freelance, has written profiles for each of the 100 players, in which he nicely balances facts and figures with the colour of an appropriate anecdote or two.  But rather than assemble them alphabetically or attempt any sort of order of merit, he has grouped them within eight different time periods, beginning with the pioneer age, between 1860 and the turn of the century, of Allan Robertson and the other forefathers of golf, and ending with the ‘Tiger Era’, beginning in 1995.  The last two entries are the two British major winners of 2011, Darren Clarke and Rory McIlroy.

In defining what makes for a great golfer, Farrell has looked beyond what each of the 80 men and 20 women of his choice actually won into how they played the game, perhaps with the dedication and commitment of a Padraig Harrington, who contributed a foreword, or with the flair and personality of an Arnold Palmer, whose endorsement of the author’s quest appears on the dust jacket.  The golfers to which crowds flock at the major championships are not always the most successful; sometimes it is the emotions they stir or their capacity to inspire that sets them apart,

Of course, any such list is subjective and Farrell does not suggest that his selection should be seen as definitive, rather as an invitation for debate when golfers gather at the ‘19th hole’.  Indeed, while he believes as many as 70 per cent of the names he settled for would make it into the top 100 among most aficionados, the other 30 would divide opinions.

So, who is the best of all, the greatest golfer of all time?  In conclusion, Farrell offers his own opinion on who should carry that mantle, or at least which two would be last to tee off in some mythical, magical tournament to determine who most deserves the accolade.

He leaves it up to the reader, however, to reach his or her own verdict, having first spent some enjoyable hours in the company of the contenders.

Tommy's Honour: The Extraordinary Story of Golf's Founding Father and Son, by Kevin Cook (HarperSport)

There was a welcome appearance among the golf titles of 2011 of a paperback edition of Tommy’s Honour, which earned author Kevin Cook a place on the shortlist for the 2007 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award when it was published in hardback.

New York-based Cook was commended for telling the story of the two Tom Morrises, father and son, both supremely talented golfers but utterly different in character, who made up a record-breaking golf dynasty.

Old Tom, the father, who grew up a stone's throw away from golf's ancestral home at St Andrews, was a wonderful 19th century character who became an Open Champion three times before running the Royal & Ancient, then the sole governing body of the game. His son, Young Tom, was blessed with a talent even more prodigious than his father, a golfing genius who could be described as the Tiger Woods of his era, and who remains the youngest player to win the Open Championship, having done so at 17 years old. He went on to win it four times in a row, on one occasion after fighting it out with his father at the last hole.

It is at once the story of the birth of the modern game of golf, in which Old Tom was such an influential figure, but also of a complex father-and-son relationship that ended in tragedy with the death of Young Tom at the age of 24, broken by the death in labour of his wife, Meg, and their unborn child.

It is a story told ‘with great tenderness and no little humour‘ according to the Daily Telegraph, while The Guardian said that 'Cook's idiosyncratic history of the early days of professional golf is detailed, loving, and almost novelistic. He captures the incestuous, money-obesessed, sometimes small-minded world of Scottish golf, delightfully.'

The Golf Miscellany, by John D T White (Carlton Books)

Obsessive types always attract odd looks and John White will have had his fair share after religiously devoting a life's worth of spare time to compiling a vast database of facts, figures and quirky stories from the world of sport.

But the Ulster-born sports nut has turned his fanaticism into something of a cottage industry, drawing on his ever-expanding library of the trivial and not-so-trivial to create an impressive catalogue of books that now stands at more than 30.

He is the author of all the titles in Carlton’s ‘Miscellany’ series, covering a range of sports from football and cricket to boxing, Formula One, horse racing and Six Nations rugby, as well as a number specific to one football club or another.

His study of Manchester United’s long history of Irish-born players -- entitled Irish Devils -- enjoyed a particularly warm reception when it was published last month by Simon & Schuster, with the official endorsement of the Old Trafford club.

His just-published and updated Golf Miscellany offers an engaging read for golf fans, assembling a host of fascinating material on topics from players and tournaments to the great golf courses. With the entries pulled together in random order, the book has the dip-in-and-out appeal so popular in Christmas gift ideas but White’s painstaking research should not be underestimated nonetheless.

While not at his computer inputting more facts and figures, John is the founding member of Carryduff Manchester United Supporters' Club in County Down, the largest official supporters club in Ireland. He has been a season ticket holder at Old Trafford for more than 20 years.


Golf on the Rocks: A Journey Round Scotland's Island Courses, by Gary Sutherland (Hachette Scotland)

Think Scottish golf courses and images of the manicured greens and sculpted fairways of St Andrews, Carnoustie, Turnberry come to mind.  Challenging courses, but aesthetically superb. Regally magnificent, as you might expect from the proud home of golf.

But they aren’t all like that, as Gary Sutherland discovered after he set out to play 18 holes on each of 18 courses on 18 Scottish islands, in honour of his late father, a ship’s captain who never sailed anywhere without his golf clubs and, when he wasn't at sea, was generally to be found on the nearest course.

In his father’s footsteps, Sutherland’s journey took him to golf courses with names such as Askernish, Machrie, Shiskine, Scarista and Balivanich, none of which has or is ever likely to host an Open Championship, courses where the hazards tend to go beyond mere water and sand traps to cows on the fairways and greens bordered by electric fences, and where locating the tee can be as difficult as finding the hole.  In one instance, the author was unable to locate even the course he was looking for, despite being absolutely certain of his bearings, and was forced to conclude it had been ploughed up to grow crops.

There is little in the rich history of golf in Scotland that has not been written about many times but the island courses have been strangely neglected, which seems odd when you learn that Askernish, on the island of South Uist, was allegedly designed by Old Tom Morris, one of the founding fathers of the sport.

Sutherland makes no claim to have written a comprehensive guidebook but Golf on the Rocks has been well received as a thoroughly entertaining read that at least goes some way towards filling the gap.

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In the footsteps of Hemingway: adrenaline and moral dilemmas in a tale of man against beast

William Hill Sports Book of the Year award -- the contenders


The winner of the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year will be revealed next Monday.  This week, The Sports Bookshelf presents a run-down of the seven titles on the short list. Today:

Into The Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight (Profile Books)

THE STORY:

In 2008, Alexander Fiske-Harrison established his literary credentials when his play, The Pendulum, set against a background of anti-semitic tension in the Vienna of 1900, and in which he also starred, made its debut in the West End and received favourable reviews. 

At around the same time, he wrote an essay about bullfighting for Prospect magazine, the reaction to which led him to move to Spain to study the subject in greater depth, in part drawn by its literary heritage -- Ernest Hemingway, for example, was a notable aficionado -- and in part, as a former member of the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, to see if he agreed with those who would have the sport banned.

He lived alongside bullfighters around the bullrings and ranches of Spain.  Captivated by the adrenaline rush as well as by history, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona and trained with the great matador Eduardo Dávila Miura with the aim of taking on a bull in the ring himself, which he felt was essential to his understanding of a sport once described by the Spanish poet and noted liberal, Garcia Lorca, as ‘the last serious thing left in the world today'.

That description had struck a chord with Fiske-Harrison in 2000, at the age of 23, when he attended his first bullfight while on holiday with his parents.  He noted, too, that Hemingway had declared bullfighting to be ‘moral’ as it gave him a ‘feeling of life, death and mortality’.  Fiske-Harrison echoes those words when he suggests that ‘you cannot ban the bullfight, because it is already contained in the very facts of life itself. All you can do is turn away‘.

It was while in Spain that he began writing a blog, entitled The Last Arena - In Search of the Spanish Bullfight, and it was the events and thoughts he described along the way that became the basis for his book.

THE CRITICS:

“He develops a taste for the whole gruesome spectacle, but what makes the book work is that he never loses his disgust for it… what I really enjoyed about Into The Arena is that after nearly 300 pages I still couldn’t quite decide whether bullfighting should be banned or allowed to flourish.”
-- Mark Palmer, Mail Online. Read more…

“His eye-witness reports of bullfights are particularly good.  He transposes the spectacle into words with great success, conveying the drama of the corrida while explaining individual moves and techniques with eloquence and precision.”
-- Miranda France, Literary Review. Read more…

"It is a world of glamour, fame and death that Fiske-Harrison penetrates in search of a solution to the 'terrible quandary' of bullfighting… the outcome is a debut that, despite some hefty flaws, provides an engrossing introduction to Spain’s 'great feast of art and danger'."
-- Brian Schofield, Sunday Times. Read more…

THE AUTHOR:

Alexander Fiske-Harrison is an English writer and actor. He was educated at Eton and subsequently at Oxford and the University of London. He trained in acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York.  In addition to writing and starring in the West End play, The Pendulum, he has written about animals and non-human intelligence for Prospect magazine as well as the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement and for the BBC and CNN.

* * * * * * *

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing prize. As well as a £23,000 cash prize, the winning author will receive a £2,000 William Hill bet, a hand-bound copy of their book, and a day at the races. 

The judging panel for this year’s award consists of broadcaster and writer John Inverdale; award-winning journalist Hugh McIlvanney; broadcaster Danny Kelly; and columnist and author, Alyson Rudd. Chairman of the panel is John Gaustad, co-creator of the award and founder of the Sportspages bookshop. 

The winner will be announced at a lunchtime reception at Waterstone’s Piccadilly (London), Europe’s largest bookstore, on Monday 28th November.

RELATED READING:

A Life Too Short

The Ghost Runner

32 Programmes
Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar

The shortlist in full:

1. Among the Fans: From Ashes to the Arrows, a Year of Watching the Watchers by Patrick Collins (Wisden Sports Writing)

2. Into The Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison (Profile Books)

3. The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop by Bill Jones (Mainstream Publishing)

4. Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson by Paul Kimmage (Simon & Schuster)

5. Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar by David Millar (Orion)

6. A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng (Yellow Jersey Press)

7. 32 Programmes by Dave Roberts (Bantam Press)

Buy Into The Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight 

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Engaging and poignant story of a marathon man cruelly denied his quest for Olympic glory

William Hill Sports Book of the Year award -- the contenders


The winner of the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year will be revealed next Monday.  This week, The Sports Bookshelf presents a run-down of the seven titles on the short list. Today:

The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop (Mainstream)

THE STORY:

John Tarrant was something of a celebrity in the 1950s and 60s, mingling with the crowds at high-profile long-distance running events, then suddenly joining the race himself, having arrived with his vest and shorts hidden beneath a long overcoat.  He became known as the Ghost Runner.  The popular press loved him.

But his appearances on the front and back pages were more than a stunt.  Often, if he didn’t collapse from exhaustion first, he would win the race, leaving crack marathon runners trailing in his wake as he set and maintained a fearsome pace.

Tarrant had dreamed of being an Olympic athlete and wanted to join Salford Harriers, hoping it would lead to a place in the Great Britain marathon team at the Rome Olympics in 1960. But when he completed his application to join the club he felt he should declare that, as a teenager in Buxton, he had been paid to take part in boxing matches.

The sums involved added up to just £17 and he expected his admission at worst to bring a mild rebuke.  Instead, the blazered officials at the Amateur Athletics Association, still dominated by a wealthy Oxbridge elite, told him that this made him a professional and banned him from competition -- for life.

So Tarrant became the mystery runner, turning up time and again to gatecrash events and deliver a bitter message to those who had denied him his dream.

Tarrant died of cancer in 1975, aged only 42, and his story might have slipped away had Bill Jones, who was making a television documentary about working class runners in Manchester, not been handed a copy of a slim autobiography Tarrant had written himself before he died.  Jones was intrigued by the man and the story, which formed the basis for an engaging book, brilliantly written.

THE CRITICS:

A tragic, poignant and touching portrayal of one man's battle to have his talent recognised and the petty rules held by the AAA at the time over-turned.
--- Derby Telegraph. Read more...

Nothing can disguise the fact that this is a terrific story - a comic strip hero made flesh, with all the human complications that entails. If I was a movie producer, I’d snap up the rights in a trice.
--- John Preston, Daily Mail. Read more...

One of THE running books of 2011
--- Running and Life.  Read more...

THE AUTHOR:

Bill Jones is a former television executive and documentary maker who spent more than 20 years with Granada TV.

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The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award is the world's longest established and most valuable literary sports-writing prize. As well as a £23,000 cash prize, the winning author will receive a £2,000 William Hill bet, a hand-bound copy of their book, and a day at the races. 

The judging panel for this year’s award consists of broadcaster and writer John Inverdale; award-winning journalist Hugh McIlvanney; broadcaster Danny Kelly; and columnist and author, Alyson Rudd. Chairman of the panel is John Gaustad, co-creator of the award and founder of the Sportspages bookshop. 

The winner will be announced at a lunchtime reception at Waterstone’s Piccadilly (London), Europe’s largest bookstore, on Monday 28th November.



RELATED READING:
A Life Too Short
32 Programmes


The shortlist in full:
1. Among the Fans: From Ashes to the Arrows, a Year of Watching the Watchers by Patrick Collins (Wisden Sports Writing)
2. Into The Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison (Profile Books)
3. The Ghost Runner: The Tragedy of the Man They Couldn't Stop by Bill Jones (Mainstream Publishing)
4. Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson by Paul Kimmage (Simon & Schuster)
5. Racing Through the Dark: The Fall and Rise of David Millar by David Millar (Orion)
6. A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng (Yellow Jersey Press)
7. 32 Programmes by Dave Roberts (Bantam Press)

More on the 2011 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award

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