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Like a Rose
- Life Lessons from a Training Camp with Hank Stram and the Kansas City Chiefs
- Narrated by: Scott Thomsen
- Length: 2 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's summary
"Football is, at heart, such a brutal, harsh game. Only someone who truly loves it and truly writes so very well can somehow make it sound lovely. Rick Telander does." (Frank Deford, National Public Radio, Sports Illustrated, HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel)
More than 30 years ago, acclaimed author and Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander was drafted out of Northwestern University by a Kansas City Chiefs team filled with future Pro Football Hall of Famers and coached by the legendary Hank Stram. In 2004, Telander found the tattered, spiral-bound journal he kept while in that training camp and, after rereading the entries he kept until being cut from the team, was amazed and moved by the life lessons he took away from that once-in-a-lifetime experience and how they can be applied to people’s lives today.
In Like a Rose, Rick Telander reproduces his training-camp journal, following each entry with his views today on how those unique events and the heartbreak of not being able to fulfill his NFL dream helped propel him into a life as one of the country’s most highly respected and well-known sportswriters. Telander, whose other books include Heaven Is a Playground, ranked as the 15th-best sports book of all time by Sports Illustrated, hopes to show how a game some see as being violent can instead offer lessons that people from any walk of life can understand. He also promises to explain the poignancy behind the enigmatic title, Like a Rose.
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Story
In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.
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Great story!!
- By Damian McKeon on 06-14-21
By: Jim Dent
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The Great Nowitzki
- Basketball and the Meaning of Life
- By: Thomas Pletzinger, Shane Anderson - translator
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The seven-foot Dirk Nowitzki is one of the great players in basketball history. With a devastating fadeaway and unexpected agility, the Dallas Mavericks superstar helped to pioneer the modern three-shooting game and became a global ambassador for the sport. Award-winning novelist and sportswriter Thomas Pletzinger traveled with Nowitzki for more than seven years, seeking the secret of his success and longevity. In novelistic detail, Pletzinger tells the dramatic story of how a lanky kid from the German suburbs became a top-five all-time scorer and NBA champion.
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👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
- By Anonymous User on 08-22-24
By: Thomas Pletzinger, and others
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Instant Replay
- The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer
- By: Jerry Kramer, Dick Schaap
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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This classic sports book takes listeners inside the 1967 season of the Green Bay Packers, following that storied team from training camp to their dramatic victory in Super Bowl II. Candid and often amusing, Jerry Kramer describes from a player's perspective a bygone era of sports, filled with blood, grit, and tears. No game better exemplifies this period than the classic "Ice Bowl" conference championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, which Kramer, who made the crucial block in the climactic play, describes in thrilling detail.
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Time capsule
- By Michael Ingarra on 01-21-24
By: Jerry Kramer, and others
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When the Game Stands Tall
- The Story of the De La Salle Spartans and Football's Longest Winning Streak
- By: Neil Hayes
- Narrated by: J. P. Linton
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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By 2002, The Streak - a historic 13-year run of consecutive wins by the Spartans, a high-school football team from Concord, California, that couldn't be beat - was still going strong. In this revised edition of When the Game Stands Tall, author Neil Hayes, who had unrestricted access to the De La Salle team, writes from the inside about the games, the players, and their visionary coach, Bob Ladouceur, who managed to amass the highest winning percentage in football history (.995) through standing for something greater than winning.
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Great story and message but PAINFULLY detailed
- By AudioAddict on 03-21-15
By: Neil Hayes
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Pistol
- The Life of Pete Maravich
- By: Mark Kriegel
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Pistol is more than the biography of a ballplayer. It's the stuff of classic novels: the story of a boy transformed by his father's dream and the cost of that dream. Even as Pete Maravich became Pistol Pete, a basketball icon for baby boomers, all the Maraviches paid a price. Now acclaimed author Mark Kriegel has brilliantly captured the saga of an American family: its rise, its apparent ruin, and, finally, its redemption.
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Extremely Good!
- By steve on 12-12-12
By: Mark Kriegel
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Badasses
- The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders
- By: Peter Richmond
- Narrated by: Barry Abrams
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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A book that explores the enduring legends of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders, Badasses is the definitive biography of arguably the last team to play old-fashioned tough-guy football. Peter Richmond, co-author of the New York Times best seller The Glory Game, offers a fascinating look at the 1970s Oakland Raiders, led by colorful greats from another era.
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Good story, slightly obnoxious author and reader
- By Harry Seaward on 01-06-19
By: Peter Richmond
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Their Life's Work
- The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers
- By: Gary M. Pomerantz
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 16 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular memory: "Mean" Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth.
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Great Book
- By cap on 07-18-18
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The Mannings
- The Fall and Rise of a Football Family
- By: Lars Anderson
- Narrated by: Ian Alan Carlsen
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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From New York Times best-selling author Lars Anderson comes a revealing portrait of the first family of American sports. What the Kennedys are to politics, the Mannings are to football. Two generations have produced three NFL superstars: Archie Manning, the Ole Miss hero-turned-New Orleans Saint; his son Peyton, widely considered one of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game; and Peyton's younger brother, Eli, who won two Super Bowl rings of his own.
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The first family of football
- By Tyler Gordon on 09-08-18
By: Lars Anderson
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The Best Game Ever
- Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL
- By: Mark Bowden
- Narrated by: Phil Gigante
- Length: 6 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season's NFL Championship game. Football was still greatly over-shadowed by the country's favored pastime - baseball - but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.
On the field and roaming the sidelines were 17 future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, and assistant coaches Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry.
The Best Game Ever is a brilliant portrait of how a single game changed the history of American sports.
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What about the other team?
- By Smalls on 11-29-08
By: Mark Bowden
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Madden
- A Biography
- By: Bryan Burwell
- Narrated by: Mark Moseley
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Several years after his playing career was cut short by injury before it had a chance to really begin, John Madden was hired as an assistant coach by the Oakland Raiders, one of professional football's most iconoclastic franchises. Two years later he was named the team's head coach and proceeded to lead the Raiders to five championship games in his first seven seasons. Following years of heartbreaking losses in some of history's most memorable games.
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Essential For Raider And Madden Fans
- By MovieGuy on 03-08-16
By: Bryan Burwell
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Paper Lion
- Confessions of a Last-String Quarterback
- By: George Plimpton, Nicholas Dawidoff - foreword
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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George Plimpton was perhaps best known for Paper Lion, the book that set the bar for participatory sports journalism. With his characteristic wit, Plimpton recounts his experiences in talking his way into training camp with the Detroit Lions, practicing with the team, and taking snaps behind center. His breezy style captures the pressures and tensions rookies confront, the hijinks that pervade when 60 high-strung guys live together in close quarters, and a host of football rites and rituals.
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Still great, after all these years!
- By D. Lichtenstein on 06-15-17
By: George Plimpton, and others
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The Keeper
- A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them
- By: Ali Benjamin, Tim Howard
- Narrated by: J.D. Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2014, Tim Howard became an overnight sensation after more than 10 years as one of America's leading professional soccer players. His record-breaking 15 saves for the United States national team against Belgium in the World Cup electrified a nation that had only recently woken up to the Beautiful Game after decades of hibernation. In this inspiring and candid memoir, the beloved US and Everton goalkeeper finally allows himself to do something that he would never do on the field: He drops his guard.
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Tim Howard Saves more then Goals!
- By Ron on 12-16-14
By: Ali Benjamin, and others
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The Keeper - Young Readers' Edition
- The Unguarded Story of Tim Howard
- By: Tim Howard
- Narrated by: William Harper
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this heartwarming and candid memoir, Tim Howard does something he would never do on a soccer field: he drops his guard. As fiercely protective about his privacy as he is guarding the goal for the US national team and for Everton in the English Premier League, Howard opens up for the first time about how a hyperactive kid from New Jersey with Tourette's syndrome defied the odds to become one of the world’s premier goalkeepers.
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Don't judge a book by it's cover.
- By Anonymous User on 08-17-17
By: Tim Howard