Beginning with their founding as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League in 1960, the Kansas City Chiefs have been one of professional football’s most storied franchises. In Tales from the Kansas City Chiefs Sideline, veteran sportswriter Bob Gretz brings the team’s rich history to life. Gretz begins with the Chiefs’ visionary, 27-year-old owner Lamar Hunt, who founded not only a team but an entire league. After the Texans won the AFL championship in 1962, Hunt moved the team out of his hometown to Kansas City. Two Super Bowl appearances as the representative of the AFL culminated in a Chiefs’ championship in 1970, despite being a double-digit underdog to the Minnesota Vikings. It would be the final game featuring an AFL team, as the Chiefs and nine other teams merged with the NFL. Gretz covers the battles leading up to the merger along with the high and low points in team history—the lean years (1972–88); the “Carl and Marty” era, when the team made the play-offs in six consecutive seasons; the “Joe and Marcus” show of 1993; the dismal 2008 season; and the team’s 2013 renewal under Andy Reid and John Dorsey. Tales from the Kansas City Chiefs Sideline is a must-have for any Chiefs fan! Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sports—books about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team. Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Some call them the Bad Boys, others just call them bad news—either way, few teams carry the passion, power, and determination exuded by the Detroit Pistons. A collection of incredible basketball talent revered in Detroit and despised throughout the rest of the NBA, the Pistons are anything and everything but boring. Now Perry A. Farrell will take fans into the locker room and onto the Pistons court in this newly revised edition of Tales from the Detroit Pistons Locker Room. With help from Pistons legends Rick Mahorn and Joe Dumars, Farrell shares stories that cover all the key characters, including Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, John Salley, Vinny Johnson, Dennis Rodman, and coach Chuck Daly. Mahorn discusses the wars with the Bulls, Celtics, and Knicks, and championship battles with the Lakers and Blazers. The book also examines the sorry state of the franchise before the two titles, their attempts to recapture their NBA magic with Grant Hill and Jerry Stackhouse, and the recent run of success that Dumars is having as the team’s general manager. Mahorn’s role as color analyst for Pistons radio broadcasts has kept him in the loop as Dumars has added players like Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace, and Darko Milicic, along with coach Larry Brown, over the past few seasons. Sharing stories from his playing and announcing days is a part of what makes Tales from the Detroit Pistons Locker Room a must-have for any Pistons fan.

"This book chronicles the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl LIV-winning season"--

In 2019, the NFL’s one hundredth season, the Chiefs once again scaled pro football’s summit, persevering through a season marked by adversity and resilience. Experience the historic journey as it has never been seen before: from the inside, through rare, on- and off-the-field photography, key never-before-seen artifacts spanning the entire campaign, and Andy Reid’s personal account of winning his first Super Bowl ring as a head coach. Chiefs Kingdom is more than a commemorative celebration of a world title; it is the epic story of a team on a mission, as a revamped defense and its new coordinator came together over the course of a long season, and the league’s most potent offense survived the temporary loss of its MVP quarterback, Patrick Mahomes. From “The West Is Not Enough” to “2-3 Jet Chip Wasp,” this lavish, handsome book documents the remarkable turn of events during the marathon regular season, as well as the unprecedented post-season run in which the Chiefs rallied from double-digit deficits in all three games. Colorful, insightful, and dramatic, Chiefs Kingdom is an absorbing account of one of the most unforgettable seasons in pro football history.

A detective with no badge, Edward Kincaid's brooding naturescared medical examiner Holly Masterson, but couldn't dimher holiday spirit. It was when she attracted a stalker thatthe most wonderful time of the year turned into the mostfrightening. Working together to reveal a conspiracy toomany people had died covering up, Holly found Edward'sprotection—and powerful embrace—hard to resist. Now, asnew clues surfaced, could she bust the case wide open andgive her silent knight the Christmas miracle he deserved?

Hail to the Chiefs is a behind-the-scenes look at the Chiefs' 1993 season and the changes made by the team in hopes of reaching championship glory. Included is the biggest NFL story of '93 -- the trade with San Francisco that brought Joe Montana to Kansas City. Also discussed is the Chiefs' pursuit of Marcus Allen and his feud with Raiders' owner Al Davis, which forced him out of Los Angeles.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football, the first contemporary book about football's formative years. American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines. Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game meant: football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements. He shows how football became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception. These different interpretations have been magnified by football's current omnipresence on television. According to Oriard, televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of football has been ignored until now. From the book: "A receiver sprints down the sideline, fast and graceful, then breaks toward the middle of the field where a safety waits for him. From forty yards upfield the quarterback releases the ball; it spirals in an elegant arc toward the goalposts as the receiver now for the first time looks back to pick up its flight. The pass is a little high; the receiver leaps, stretches, grasps the ball--barely, fingers clutching--at the very moment that the safety drives a helmet into his unprotected ribs. The force of the collision flings the receiver backward, slamming him to the turf. . . . This familiar tableau, this exemplary moment in a football game, epitomizes the appeal of the sport: the dramatic confrontation of artistry with violence, both equally necessary."

The Kansas City Chiefs have enjoyed great success the last 50-plus years, having played in Super Bowl I, and later winning their first title in Super Bowl IV. Now the Chiefs appear to be on the verge of winning the Super Bowl once again In Kansas City Chiefs Legends, fans can relive the best of a golden era of football with stories from Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, Len Dawson, Christian Okoye, Jamaal Charles, Priest Holmes, Nick Lowery, Deron Cherry and other Chiefs greats. Watch as Mahomes takes the city and NFL by storm throwing 50 touchdown passes and winning the NFL MVP award in his first year as a starting quarterback. Dance with Kelce as he becomes the best tight end in the game. Hear the roar of the crowd after a Derrick Thomas sack. And go for a ride with Okoye as he runs over and away from defenders. From Lamar Hunt founding the franchise, to the days of Hank Stram and his innovative new offense, to the Marty Schottenheimer and Carl Peterson years, to the team's run to the 2019 AFC championship game, it's all here in Kansas City Chiefs Legends, the ultimate tribute book for fans of Chiefs Kingdom.