Steven Gerrard autobiography puts Donald McRae in line for another award

Donald McRae, twice winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize, is an early favourite to be among the winners at the 2016 Cross Sports Book Awards.

The South African-born writer, whose interviews in The Guardian newspaper are always worth reading, collaborated with former Liverpool and England captain Steven Gerrard on his autobiography, My Story.

The book is notable for some frank opinions on colleagues and opponents, referees and managers, but also for Gerrard's ability to look inside himself and describe how he was affected by the ups and downs of his career.

After completing the book, published after the player said his farewells to Liverpool before moving to conclude his career in America, McRae commented: "Gerrard leads us through every exhilarating high and bruising low of his 27 years at Liverpool. It is a career full of contrast and drama.

“There is depth and pathos, too, because Steven Gerrard is a one-club man who joined the Liverpool academy at the age of eight. While English football has turned itself inside out, undergoing enormous upheaval, often fuelled by greed and selfishness, Gerrard has stayed constant.

“Many of the goals are incredible while the biggest games are riveting. His very public long goodbye is often painful, always moving. But the grittier, far more private details are the most powerful."

My Story has been installed 5-2 favourite with bookmakers Bet365 to take the prize in the autobiography section after the release of a longlist in this category.

Second favourite at 3-1 is Winner: My Racing Life, the autobiography of just-retired 20-times champion jockey, AP McCoy, written with the help of best-selling writer and broadcaster, Charlie Connelly.

Last in the Tin Bath, the autobiography of former cricketer, umpire and England coach David 'Bumble' Lloyd, which was ghosted by sports journalist Richard Gibson, is third favourite at 7-2.

Also among the contenders are Sunderland manager Sam Allardyce's Big Sam, former Formula One world champion Nigel Mansell's Staying on Track and another life story from the world of motor racing, Formula One and Beyond, by controversial administrator Max Mosley, the former president of the sport's governing body, the FIA.

The list will be reduced to a shortlist of six titles in the spring and the winner announced on 1 June, along with the other winners in 12 categories, including football, rugby, cricket and cycling books of the year.

The full longlist for Autobiography of the Year 2016:

My Story, by Steven Gerrard (Penguin)
Staying on Track: The Autobiography,  by Nigel Mansell (Simon & Schuster)
Last in the Tin Bath: The Autobiography, by David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd (Simon & Schuster)
Where Am I?: My Autobiography, by Phil Tufnell (Headline)
Bomb: My Autobiography, by Adam Jones (Headline)
Big Sam: My Autobiography, by Sam Allardyce (Headline)
Formula One and Beyond: The Autobiography, by Max Mosley (Simon & Schuster)
Second Innings: My Sporting Life, by Andrew Flintoff (Hodder & Stoughton)
Carry Me Home: My Autobiography, by Ben Cohen (Ebury)
Interesting: My Autobiography, by Steve Davis (Ebury)
Winner: My Racing Life, by A.P. McCoy (Orion)
The World of Cycling According to G, by Geraint Thomas (Quercus)

All these titles are also available from Waterstones and WHSmith

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Strong field for Biography of the Year at British Sports Book Awards

BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2012

There are eight contenders named on the shortlist in the biography and autobiography category for the British Sports Book Awards 2012. 

It is a particularly strong field. Ronald Reng's story of the tragic life of German international goalkeeper Robert Enke is also named in the Football Book of the Year category, while Jonny Wilkinson's autobiography Jonny and Paul Kimmage's Engage, a superb biography of the paralysed rugby player Matt Hampson, are shortlisted for Rugby Book of the Year.  The Breaks are Off, the autobiography of Graeme Swann, is another double nomination, listed among the contenders for Cricket Book of the Year.

The awards will be announced at the Savoy Hotel in London on May 21, after which sports book fans will be able to vote for one or other of the category winners to determine the overall Sports Book of the Year for 2012.

A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke

Author: Ronald Reng
Published by: Yellow Jersey

On November 10th, 2009, the German national goalkeeper, Robert Enke, parked his car close to a level crossing and stepped in front of a train. He was 32 years old.  Friends and supporters were unable to comprehend why Enke, who was likely to have been Germany’s first choice ’keeper at the 2010 World Cup finals, should have taken his own life. But behind his success lay a different Robert Enke, one who suffered personal tragedy and struggled with anxiety and depression.  Award-winning writer Ronald Reng pieces together the tragedy of a man who had also been his friend, revealing much about the pressure on those who play sport at the top level.

Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson

Author: Paul Kimmage
Published by: Simon & Schuster

Matt Hampson, a 20-year-old tight-head prop from the Leicester Tigers club, was taking part in an England Under-21 training session when he suffered a freak accident that left him paralysed from the neck down.  Journalist Paul Kimmage visited Hampson as he recuperated, and wrote an article that won him the Sports Journalists’ Association interviewer of the year award. The friendship they struck up led Kimmage to tell Hampson’s full story, in all its harrowing detail, from the build-up to the fateful day, the drama of the accident itself, the incredibly long rehabilitation, and his struggle to adjust to what passes for him as a normal life.

How Not to Be a Professional Footballer

Author: Paul Merson
Pubished by: HarperSport

Paul Merson won 21 England caps in a playing career that spanned 12 years with Arsenal, during which he earned two League titles plus FA Cup, League Cup and Cup-Winners' Cup medals. But his life off the pitch was a mess. He became addicted to alcohol, gambling and - briefly - cocaine, often going straight to training from an all-night binge.  His gambling habit cost him a staggering £7 million.  Much of his chaotic career he recalls with hilarity, particularly some of the vile practical jokes he played on teammates, but beneath the booze-fuelled mindlessness lies a rather sad story of a man so possessed by his demons that he once contemplated breaking his own fingers to stop himself dialling the phone number of his bookie.

Jonny: My Autobiography

Author: Jonny Wilkinson
Pubished by: Headline

Written in collaboration with Times journalist Owen Slot, Wilkinson's autobiography takes readers on a candidly personal voyage into the farthest reaches of his complex character, setting out the inner torment that have accompanied much of his success as well as the long periods of physical injury.  It reveals the fears that have dogged him since childhood and tipped him sometimes into bouts of depression and which have made the goals of fulfilment and true happiness almost impossible to attain.   A gripping examination of the human psyche that throws up many thoughts and experiences that will be uncomfortably familiar to others haunted by self-doubt.

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

Author: David Millar
Published by: Orion

A compelling and at times harrowing account of cycling champion David Millar's fall into the murky world of doping. Banned for two years after being arrested in 2004 and admitting that he had taken the blood-boosting hormone, Erythropoietin -- better known as EPO -- Millar returned to racing and rebuilt his career, determined not only to compete without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs but to campaign against them.  In a powerful narrative, Millar describes the complexity of the circumstances in which he allowed himself to be drawn into the doping culture and offers considerable insight how drugs turned his sport rotten in a way that surpassed even the incidence of cheating in athletics.

Red: My Autobiography

Author: Gary Neville
Published by: Bantam Press

Gary Neville's autobiography is perhaps not as controversial as some might have imagined from a footballer often described as a dressing room shop steward but what his opinions may lack in colour they make up for in candour.  But this is not so much a platform from which to settle scores -- often the object of the exercise when a retired footballer goes into print -- as one from which Neville describes a how he became one of the best English defenders of his generation, making the most of his ability through sheer hard work, emerging from a crop of players in many cases blessed with more natural talent yet establishing himself as a key member of the United team.

Willie Thorne - Taking A Punt On My Life

Author: Willie Thorne
Pubished by: Vision Sports Publishing

Willie Thorne conformed to the tabloid stereotype as a leading player during snooker’s boom years in the 1980s. He worked hard at the table and partied hard away from it. He revelled in his celebrity, indulged his hangers-on and enjoyed no shortage of female attention. And he gambled -- on card games, horse races and anything else that took his fancy.  It fitted nicely with the image but in fact was already an addiction, and one that would only deepen, leading to bankruptcy and an attempt to take his own life.  Thorne tells the full, sorry story of what he sees now as a false existence, one that concealed the flaws and weaknesses that he came to realise lay behind not only his gambling but his habit of letting the game's major prizes slip through his grasp.

The Breaks are Off - My Autobiography

Author: Graeme Swann
Published by: Hodder & Stoughton

In an era when sportsmen are encouraged to be blandly non-controversial, Graeme Swann stands out.  He is the hugely successful off-spin bowler in the ultra-professional modern England team yet seems to yearn for the days when cricket had an inherent social flavour. He would rather say what he thinks, play for laughs and refresh himself in whatever way takes his fancy.  His autobiography makes that very plain, revealing Swann at his wise-cracking, straight-talking and enthusiastically imbibing best in a romp through the peaks and troughs of his career.  It is not a story that reveals much about the deeper Swann but is a thoroughly entertaining one.


The British Sports Book Awards shortlists in full

Spotlight on the contenders for Racing Book of the Year
Shortlisted titles for Cricket Book of the Year
In the running for Football Book of the Year
The Contenders for Golf Book of the Year

Coming soon:  The Sports Bookshelf's guide to the shortlisted titles in the Motorsports category.

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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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New take on the Higgins legend

It is more than 20 years since Alex Higgins took part in his last World Snooker Championships and yet still there is no player to whom the popularity of that tournament -- and the game in general -- owes a greater legacy.

His flamboyant playing style and his chaotic life away from the table were the perfect combination as the sport sought to move away from dingy clubs into the nation’s front rooms in the latter half of the 1970s, when television viewers and tabloid newspaper readers developed a taste for sport laced with soap opera.

He gave the game its blueprint for success, encouraging countless young men not only to strive for brilliance with a cue but to live a little on the wild side, too, perhaps.

There have been better players (though it should not be forgotten that he won the world title twice) but no bigger character, no one to command the attention of the public in the same way, whether for his extraordinary skills or his volatile temperament.

Higgins destroyed himself ultimately with drink, drugs and tobacco, his uniquely bizarre life ending last July, when his emaciated body was discovered in his flat in Belfast. He was effectively homeless when he won his first world championship in 1972 and, having blown every penny of the £3 million he made from the game, he died with much the same status, living in sheltered accommodation.

And just as the seedier side of his fellow Ulsterman, George Best, retains a fascination for the reading public, so too the more tawdry, seamier aspects of the Higgins story continue to have an irresistible draw.

A new collection of Higgins stories will hit the bookstores next month when John Blake Publishing releases Let Me Tell You About Alex: Crazy Days and Nights on the Road with the Hurricane, by John Virgo, the former UK snooker champion whose career coincided with that of Higgins and who numbered himself among his friends.

Virgo was one of a number of former snooker stars who turned out in Manchester last May at a fund-raising dinner held in his honour, with the sad aim of helping to drum up £20,000 so that Higgins, down to six stones in weight and living on baby food as a result of throat cancer, might have implants to replace the teeth he had lost through aggressive radiotherapy.  Sadly Higgins was never well enough to undergo the surgery necessary.

The book is described as “an affectionate portrait” but the publishers’ synopsis promises something more than a sycophantic attempt to bathe the Higgins story in more palatable light.

“Whatever else he was,” it reads, “Alexander Gordon Higgins wasn't nice. Unpredictable, wild, demonic and obsessive for certain. John Virgo knew Higgins as well as anyone. He made no apologies for his friend and was frequently driven to despair by his antics -- the gambling, the drug-using, the sheer, uninhibited madness of the man.”

It will have to be good, though, to match the account put together by the journalist Bill Borrows in 2002 after his attempts to stay onside with Higgins long enough to write an authorised biography ultimately collapsed over the player’s financial demands.

The Hurricane: The Turbulent Life & Times of Alex Higgins was hailed as not only one of the best books written about snooker but one of the most compelling sports biographies, drawing on painstaking research and countless interviews, as well as starkly enlightening times spent with his subject.

Click on the highlighted link to buy Bill Borrows's book or here to pre-order Let Me Tell You About Alex: Crazy Days and Nights on the Road with the Hurricane

For more on snooker and more sports biographies, visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop.

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