In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game -- Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall's prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.

A hilarious tribute to baseball and to the fathers and sons who share the love of the game. Are We Winning? is built around a trip to Wrigley Field to watch the St. Louis Cardinals play the Chicago Cubs--the "lovable losers" to most fans but the hated enemy to the Leitch men. Along for the ride are both Will's father, the gregarious but not-exactly demonstrative Midwestern titan who, despite being a die-hard Cards fan and living his whole life just 200 miles south of Chicago, had never been to Wrigley Field before this game, and Will's college friend, a lifelong Cubs fan. The Cardinals have recently fallen out of the pennant race, and the Cubs, as it turns out, are attempting to clinch the division on this Saturday afternoon in September. The pitchers are Ted Lilly for the Cubs and Joel Pineiro for the Cardinals. It's just a regular game. Play ball. The book unfolds in half-inning increments where Will gives one-of-a-kind insight on the past, present, and future of the game--from Pujols' unrivaled greatness to the myth that steroids have ruined baseball. Along the way, he shares memories of his father and growing up in the small town of Mattoon, including the year his dad coached his Little League team and nicknamed a scrawny kid "Bulldog," and an unlikely postgame episode involving a biker bar and Mr. Holland's Opus. And there is beer. Lots and lots of beer. Are We Winning? is a book about the indelible bond that links fathers and sons. For the Leitch men it's baseball that holds them together--not that either of them would ever be so weak as to admit it. No matter how far apart they are or what's going on in their lives, they'll always be able to talk about baseball. It's the story of being a fan, a story about fathers, sons, and legacies. And one perfect game.

Ever since the first caveman picked up the first rock and tossed it to the first caveson, sports has forged a powerful link between generations of men. And ever since the advent of the sports page, those experiences have been lovingly chronicled by exceptional writers like poet laureate Donald Hall, Pulitzer prizewinner Buzz Bissinger, and classic American author Norman Maclean. In Fathers & Sons & Sports, ESPN collects the very best of those stories: page after page of unforgettable tales about fathers sending their sons off to battle, sons who dared to challenge their fathers in competition, boys and men finding a common language in a shared passion. From the Little League diamond to the local fishing hole to the high school wrestling mat to the collegiate gridiron, from the backyards of America to the most famous stadiums in the world, these stories all share one thing: breathtaking insight into what makes sports an essential part of life. This book is a testament to why and how men bond over sports--a stunning mix of observation and discovery, humor and pathos, literature and journalism--introduced by best-selling columnist Mike Lupica, who just so happens to be a father and a son himself.

Fowles looks at and discusses the folklore aspect between fathers and sons when they play catch.

"A story about baseball. About fathers and sons. It's about memory and identity, and an insidious illness that can rob a person of both."--T.p. 4

The author chronicles his son's senior year of high school baseball, the boy's obsession with and talent for sports, and his efforts to keep his grades up while deciding what college to attend and avoiding problems until graduation.

One of America's finest poets joins forces with one of baseball's most outrageous pitchers to paint a revealing portrait of our national game. Donald Hall's forceful, yet elegant, prose brings together all the elements of Dock Ellis's story into a seamless whole. The two of them, the pitcher and the poet, give us remarkable insight into the customs and culture of this closed clannish world. Dock's keen vision, filtered through Hall's extraordinary voice, shows us the hardships and problems of the thinking athlete in an unthinking world.

An only child whose father works two jobs recalls their five minute daily games of catch as precious moments and symbolic of their communication as the dynamics of the relationship change through the years, only to be reborn when the son becomes a father himself.

“If we mean to change our ways, how will we do it? How will we make our food and our system of food production healthy, sustainable, and secure? How will we make them, in a word, sane? Who will do this work?” Ray Huling knows the hard realities of shellfishing. His father and grandfathers were shellfishermen on Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, laborers in an age-old trade. Because he grew up surrounded by quahaugers, the industry is in his blood and the drive to keep it sustainable is what makes up his family history. In Harvesting the Bay, Huling answers these pressing questions and delivers a moving portrait of the men and women who work the waters of the Atlantic Coast in the harsh environment of the shellfishing industry. Huling argues that any successful sustainable food enterprise will likely resemble shellfishing in Rhode Island, an industry that has existed sustainably for over 150 years, with its complex system of governance, its fierce and obsessive workforce, and its conflicts within communities and between generations. This thought-provoking book sets the complexities of sustainable food production against a heartwarming story of one family’s enduring years of work on the seas.

"This is a very personal book, a shared remembrance, about sports and sons and fathers, about youth and lost youth and teamwork - written by a former little boy who watches his own son captain a school football team. Huddle is about the ultimate home team: the touching story of three generations of one family linked by the game of football. Contrary to some popular notions, Huddle shows that modern male bonding is possible through play, not battle. Indeed, nowhere in this intimate account does anyone incite aggression with "Football is war." Football is, instead, life. The players here are boys. Their guides and mentors are men, who huddle with their eager, padded charges to pass on the rules of life through a game. The task at hand is doing your best, which, like as not, is better than you thought. From that beautifully simple formula comes highly complex behavior: cooperation, daring, open admissions of self-doubt, even creativity. Sometimes winning. Sometimes not." "But more importantly, this is a book about learning how to be a person, and how those lessons are passed from father to son, to son, to son. For the author, the process began on the blurry screen of a tiny black-and-white Dumont television in the 1950s with Ohio State - the good guys - defending their turf. Here was something new. No bats. No bases. It took Dad, the engineer, to disassemble this bizarre and foreign ritual in a kind of Socratic sports seminar. Before long, a young Andrew Malcolm had found his own way into the linebacking corps of the team at high school. And a generation later, other young Malcolm males take to familiar fields to begin the process anew. And so on."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved