From its inception, Sports Illustrated has chronicled baseball's greatest spectacle: the World Series. Now, SI celebrates the grandeur and spirit of the Fall Classic with a deluxe commemorative book featuring the magazine's iconic photography alongside classic stories from legendary writers. Along with overviews of notable teams and championships, this new volume includes stats, facts, and anecdotes spanning World Series history. The nostalgic past meets the electric present in this ultimate examination of baseball's storied event. Bringing MLB history to life by diving into the legendary SI archives, Sports Illustrated The World Series is essential for every baseball fan's collection.

This is a practical book for players, coaches and those spectators who seek a deeper understanding of a changing game. It is still shaped and controlled by the people who play, coach and watch it.

Celebrate the championship glory and Hall of Fame personalities that make the Los Angeles Lakers one of the most iconic franchises in all of sports Standard-bearers for basketball greatness, the Los Angeles Lakers have thrilled their loyal fans since the franchise moved west in 1960. Led by Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, they raced to the top of the league and refused to slow down, with superstars like Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal and LeBron James carrying the torch on the way to 17 NBA championships.Sports Illustrated™ now celebrates the Lakers with an extraordinary collection of classic writing and photographs from the pages of SI. This commemorative book also spotlights the players, championships and stats that have made the Lakers the greatest show on earth.Featuring a foreword by Howard Beck and stories by Frank DeFord, Jack McCallum, Chris Ballard and more, this is an essential volume for Lakers fans.

For decades, Sports Illustrated has chronicled hockey's greatest spectacle: the pursuit of the Stanley Cup. Now, SI celebrates the incomparable grandeur and spirit with a lavish commemorative book featuring the magazine's iconic photography alongside classic, archival stories from legendary writers. Along with overviews of notable teams and championships, this new volume includes stats, facts, and anecdotes spanning Stanley Cup history. The nostalgic past meets the electric present in this ultimate examination of hockey's storied event. Bringing NHL history to life by diving into the legendary SI archives, Sports Illustrated The Stanley Cup is essential for every hockey fan's collection.

Sports Illustrated, the most respected voice in sports journalism, has covered the National Football League for over seven decades, documenting its heroes, villains, great characters, and iconic moments. A wide-ranging portrait of America's game, this anthology features the best pro football writing from the SI archives by nationally renowned journalists including George Plimpton, Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, and Paul Zimmerman.

For the last 20 years, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED has collected and featured weekly signs from the world of sports that the Apocalypse is upon us: Tales of frenzied fans, egomaniacal coaches, Hall of Famers who run afoul of the law, mind-boggling bureaucracy, violent behavior and tastelessness run amok. In 18 humorous chapters, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED brings us all the sports insanity, including examples like: 12/27/93 In an effort to help notoriously dour Norwegians appear more cheerful during the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, local officials planned to distribute 80,000 “smile holders"—strap-on devices equipped with plastic hooks that tug the wearers’ mouths into grins. 9/22/08 A 33-year-old Green Bay woman allegedly stole her estranged 15-year-old daughter’s identity and enrolled in high school because she wanted to be a cheerleader. 1/29/07 A Chicago woman had labor induced three days early so her husband could attend the NFC championship game. THE SPORTS ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF THE APOCALYPSE presents two decades of proof that people who play sports, coach sports, run sports, cover sports and watch sports are sometimes out of their collective mind.

In the half-century since its birth, as Sports Illustrated grew from a struggling start-up to America's preeminent sports magazine, one thing has remained constant: the commitment to great storytelling. That part of the magazine's mission has always been easy to define: Identify the most compelling sports stories of our time and get the best writers in the business to tell them. This book brings together a lineup of writing talent worthy of the Hall of Fame and the classic stories they produced for Sports Illustrated over the past 50 years. Many of the writers whose work is collected here are longtime favorites of SI readers (Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Steve Rushin, Gary Smith). Others are former SI staffers or contributors who left the fold, but not before making an indelible mark on SI's history (Dan Jenkins, Rick Telander, Mark Kram, Roy Blount Jr., William Nack). There are celebrated journalists (A.J. Liebling, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton), screenwriters (Budd Schulberg and Kenny Moore), renowned novelists (Thomas McGuane, Pete Dexter, Wallace Stegner, Don DeLillo) and even a couple of Nobel Prize winners in literature (William Faulkner and John Steinbeck). The stories themselves are a mirror of our times. Included in this volume are accounts of some of the most memorable athletic feats of our era (Secretariat's Belmont victory, the Thrilla in Manila, and Bobby Thomson's shot heard round the world). Profiles of the towering athletic figures of our time (Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, Ted Williams and Johnny Unitas). Good guys (Yogi Berra and Harry Caray) and bad guys (Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson). The fast (Roger Bannister) and the furious (Dick Butkus). The ridiculous (Howard Cosell) and the sublime (Josh Gibson). And the stories that simply touch our hearts and inspire us (Frank Deford's masterpiece on light heavyweight champ Billy Conn). This is the very best of the world's best sports magazine ¾ and it just doesn't get any better than that.

For more than 50 years, Sports Illustrated has been the gold standard of sports writing, and during that time, football—once a popular college pastime but only a rag-tag professional game—has moved to center stage, taking its unquestioned place as America’s most popular sport. This book brings together dozens of football classics from the pages of SI, featuring the work of such esteemed writers as John O’Hara and Jack Kerouac, Dan Jenkins and George Plimpton, Don DeLillo and John Undrwood and John Ed Bradley. And, of course, the collection includes many of the longtime favorites of SI readers: Frank Deford and Rick Reilly, Steve Rushin and Gary Smith, Peter King and Rick Telander and the inimitable Dr. Z, Paul Zimmerman. Covering more than half a century of the game at every level from high school to the Super Bowl, this volume will be indispensable reading for serious football fans.

The modern game of football is filled with plays and formations with names like the Counter Trey, the Wildcat, the Zone Blitz and the Cover Two. They have become part of the sport's vernacular, and yet for many fans they remain just names, often confusing ones. To rectify that, Tim Layden has drilled deep into the core of the game to reveal not only how these chalkboard X's and O's really work on the field, but also where they came from and who dreamed them up. These playbook schemes, many of them illuminated by diagrams, bear the insignia of some of the game's great innovators, men like Vince Lombardi, Don Coryell, Tom Osborne, Bill Walsh, Tony Dungy and Buddy Ryan. But football has also been radically altered by the ingenious work of men with more obscure names, like Tiger Ellison, Emory Bellard and Mouse Davis. In Blood, Sweat and Chalk, Layden takes readers into the meeting rooms-and in some cases the living rooms-where the game's most significant ideas were hatched. He goes to the coaches and to the players who inspired them, and lets them tell their stories. In candid conversations with some of football's most intriguing characters, Layden provides a fascinating guide to the game, helping fans to better see the subtleties of America's favorite sport.