Sports

For Tony Hawk, it wasn't enough to skate for two decades, to invent more than eighty tricks, and to win more than twice as many professional contests as any other skater. It wasn't enough to knock himself unconscious more than ten times, fracture several ribs, break his elbow, knock out his teeth twice, compress the vertebrae in his back, pop his bursa sack, get more than fifty stitches laced into his shins, rip apart the cartilage in his knee, bruise his tailbone, sprain his ankles, and tear his ligaments too many times to count. No. He had to land the 900. And after thirteen years of failed attempts, he nailed it.It had never been done before.

Growing up in Sierra Mesa, California, Tony was a hyperactive demon child with an I44 IQ. He threw tantrums, terrorized the nanny until she quit, exploded with rage whenever he lost a game; this was a kid who was expelled from preschool. When his brother, Steve, gave him a blue plastic hand-me-down skateboard and his father built a skate ramp in the driveway, Tony finally found his outlet--while skating, he could be as hard on himself as he was on everyone around him.

But it wasn't an easy ride to the top of the skating game. Fellow skaters mocked his skating style and dubbed him a circus skater. He was so skinny he had to wear elbow pads on his knees, and so light he had to ollie just to catch air off a ramp. He was so desperate to be accepted by young skating legends like Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, and Christian Hosoi that he ate gum from between Steve's toes. But a few years of determination and hard work paid off in multiple professional wins, and the skaters who once had mocked him were now trying to learn his tricks. Tony had created a new style of skating.

In Hawk Tony goes behind the scenes of competitions, demos, and movies and shares the less glamorous demands of being a skateboarder--from skating on Italian TV wearing see-through plastic shorts to doing a demo in Brazil after throwing up for five days straight from food poisoning. He's dealt with teammates who lit themselves and other subjects on fire, driving down a freeway as the dashboard of their van burned. He's gone through the unpredictable ride of the skateboard industry during which, in the span of a few years, his annual income shrank to what he had made in a single month and then rebounded into seven figures. But Tony's greatest difficulty was dealing with the loss of his number one fan and supporter--his dad, Frank Hawk.

With brutal honesty, Tony recalls the stories of love, loss, bad hairdos, embarrassing '80s clothes, and his determination that had shaped his life. As he takes a look back at his experiences with the skateboarding legends of the '70s, '80s, and '90s, including Stacy Peralta, Eddie Elguera, Lance Mountain, Mark Gonzalez, Bob Burnquist, and Colin Mckay, he tells the real history of skateboarding--and also what the future has in store for the sport and for him.

A revealing and intimate biography of the man who influenced Tiger Woods the most-his father, Earl Woods
Tiger Woods has been with us since he appeared on "The Mike Douglas Show" as a two-year-old, hitting golf balls for Bob Hope. In the three decades since, he established himself as the most dominant golfer of all time and became the wealthiest athlete on the planet. And beside him was his father and best friend, Earl Woods.
In "His Father's Son," bestselling author Tom Callahan recounts the life of Earl Dennison Woods and his son. Callahan recounts Earl's boyhood in Manhattan, Kansas, his days as a star baseball player at Kansas State, and his military career with the special forces. He details Earl's final tour in Vietnam, where he became close friends with a South Vietnamese operative named Tiger Phong. Earl picked up golf after his retirement from the military, and when he became a father for the last time, his son-another Tiger-would watch him hit balls from his high chair. As soon as Tiger could stand, he was swinging a golf club. Under Earl's tutelage, he went on to the most storied amateur career in golf history. He was a millionaire the day he announced he was going pro.
Callahan follows Tiger through every one of his major championship wins, discussing his complex and ever-changing relationship with his father. He places Tiger into the context of golf history, detailing his chase of Nicklaus's records and his interactions with fellow pros. He reveals that Tiger stepped away from golf after his father's death, and examines Tiger's recent troubles in light of his father's own womanizing.
Written in lyric prose and based on interviews with Earl, Tiger, and dozens of insiders, Callahan reveals in "His Father's Son" the man who made Tiger who he is.

Looking for a game? Here's your guided tour of the country's best pickup basketball courts, from the blacktops of Brooklyn to the asphalt of Anchorage to the gyms of Jackson, Mississippi. It's all inside: where the pros play, the most scenic runs in the land, and a ranking of the top five courts. Chris Ballard and three other former college players piled into a used Chevy van and traveled thirty-one thousand miles in seven months, playing at over a thousand courts in 166 cities in forty-eight states. This is the story of their roundball road trip and a guide to the places, people, and communities they encountered. More than a travel guide, Hoops Nation is a celebration of the game of basketball as it is played in America. It includes guides to streetball fashion, the lingo of the courts, the etiquette of the pickup world, the tricks of old-guy basketball, and tips for the dunking impaired. Also included are profiles of playground legends and dispatches from the legions of basketball lifers who populate the country's courts. This book can tell you where they're running today, all over America. Who's got next?