In light of today’s steroid scandals, it’s both ironic and nostalgic to revisit a time when a baseball player’s worst sins were womanizing and drinking. The great Babe Ruth was guilty as charged on both counts, and Leigh Montville’s The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth makes no attempt to sugarcoat the Bambino’s human failings. Montville, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, fully acknowledges the efforts of Ruth’s previous biographers even drawing upon some of their primary sources then proceeds to take his own singular aim on the subject. Alas, many of the details of Ruth’s early life are shrouded or not fully documented, and after he’d become a national sports hero of unparalleled wealth and fame, events were often filtered through a contemporary press that seemed more determined to inflate the man’s image rather than publicize the unbridled truth. Montville makes a stylish effort to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, and he further engages the reader by effectively putting Ruth in the context of his peers and the cataclysmic times that spanned the First World War, the Roaring ’20s and the Great Depression. Yet the most compelling episodes concern the Babe’s formative years, most of them spent at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, where a spartan order of Catholics essentially raised him, taught him baseball and facilitated his opportunity to turn pro, thus giving rise to a Horatio Alger story on a grand scale. Montville vividly presents the heroic details of Ruth’s playing career, making it clear that, despite all the home-run-hitting prowess that changed the face of the game and set records that stood for decades, Ruth was also a dominant pitcher who could have had a Hall of Fame career in that position as well. What plainly emerges here is that Ruth was a simple, unreflective guy with huge appetites, who loved playing baseball, being a celebrity and spending his money on the good life. Montville captures these essentials with sufficient color, while also effectively describing the Babe’s inevitable professional decline and his bittersweet final years outside of the game, where he lingered as a tame curiosity figure before dying of cancer in 1948 at the age of 53.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

They were giants of women’s tennis at a time when such notoriety didn’t guarantee the kind of riches today’s sports icons take for granted. Each was an outsider: one a Southern-born African American who grew up in Harlem, the other a South African Jew transplanted to London, both anomalies in their lily-white world.

These were reasons enough for Angela Buxton and Althea Gibson to draw toward each other not just on the court as doubles partners, but also many years later, during the moment of life-threatening crisis that confronts Gibson at the beginning of Bruce Schoenfeld’s The Match: Althea Gibson ∧ Angela Buxton. This is in fact the book’s central premise, yet it’s the differences in the women’s stories that make this narrative compelling.

Buxton, for example, took to the spotlight with some ambivalence, even keeping her “day job” at a tennis store in London after becoming the first British women’s player to reach the Wimbledon finals in 17 years. By championship standards, her successes were modest: when a wrist injury cut short her career, she was left with a record that included no major singles titles. Gibson, in contrast, was the first African American to win a major tennis title, winning the French Open in 1956 and Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1957 (she won all three tournaments in 1958). She enjoyed much more longevity than Buxton, in part because she had no choice; unlike Buxton, she never saved much money and thus had to play far past her prime to make ends meet.

Schoenfeld honors Gibson and Buxton in parallel narratives that frequently intersect but ultimately stand on their own. Their childhoods, families and lovers pass by, vivid and real. Though played more than half a century ago, their greatest matches bound through Schoenfeld’s rhythmic writing, as exciting as volleys shown live on ESPN. In the end, Schoenfeld scores a victory of his own in finding the drama that’s often buried in stats, and the shades of love and sorrow that celebrity’s glare obscures.

A few years ago, committed amateur golfer Ron Cherney and sportswriter Michael Arkush sent letters out to 200-plus pro golfers, male and female, soliciting their feedback about their personal best individual shots in competition. The result is My Greatest Shot: The Top Players Share Their Defining Golf Moments, which compiles the responses of 80 pros, active or retired, including Palmer, Nicklaus, Woods, Watson, Billy Casper, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth, Carol Mann and others. For each respondent, the authors provide a brief bio, career highlights and quotes on the game and life in general.

Edited by sportswriter and former PGA Tour caddie Bradley S. Klein, A Walk in the Park: Golfweek’s Guide to America’s Best Classic and Modern Golf Courses features compact yet evocative course descriptions and coolly informative essays on broader architectural and design issues. Best of all, there is a bevy of lustrous color photos that exploit the courses’ singular vistas.

In Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story, all-world sportswriter John Feinstein offers a tribute to pro caddy Bruce Edwards. Completed before Edwards’ recent death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, the book captures his easy persona and lifelong love of the game, focusing in particular on his 25-year association with Tom Watson, who, through the late ’70s and early ’80s, was probably golf’s finest player.

With its thorough research and unstinting personal and professional detail, Ben Hogan: An American Life fills in the blanks of the life of one of America’s most enigmatic and overachieving sportsmen. Hogan (1912-1997) overcame childhood trauma he saw his father commit suicide to carve out a legacy as an unrelenting shot-maker who set the standard for the later greats of modern golf. Author James Dodson probes Hogan’s seemingly jinxed early career, his ascension to the pinnacle of his sport, his contentious relationship with the press, his remarkable comeback after a calamitous 1949 auto crash, and his sometimes difficult but devoted marriage.

Bob Knight is the subject of a fine biography by Steve Delsohn and Mark Heisler, Bob Knight: An Unauthorized Biography. Knight has won three national championships and an Olympic gold medal during a stormy career that’s taken him from Army to Indiana to Texas Tech, making friends and enemies by the bushel along the way. The central question about him always has been whether the ends (championship teams, a clean program) justify the means (intimidation, verbal abuse, etc.). The authors don’t come out with a direct answer; they are too busy interviewing as many people as they can find to comment on the events in Knight’s career. The resulting book is a balanced look at a life that almost forces people to choose sides.

It’s easy to conclude after reading this biography that Knight would have benefited from a little discipline from his bosses early in his coaching career. Maybe then he could have controlled his behavior and remained just as good a coach. In any case, Knight remains a fascinating character, and Delsohn and Heisler deserve credit for this fascinating portrait. Budd Bailey works in the sports department of the Buffalo News.

Until the 1950s, golf remained a rather elitist game, played for relatively modest purses and equally modest media attention. In The Wicked Game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and the Story of Modern Golf, Howard Sounes provides a rigorously well-written history of how that all changed. Arnold Palmer, says Sounes, is the guy chiefly responsible for golf’s high-profile, big-money modern ways, having captured a devoted fan following in the late ’50s through dramatic tournament wins and the projection of a common-man personality. Sounes shows how Jack Nicklaus built on Palmer’s efforts and includes a detailed account of the life and precocious achievements of Tiger Woods. Fascinating biographical material is mixed with sociocultural analysis of golf’s growing pains, in particular the hard-won fight for black golfers to gain access to exclusive events and major money-making opportunities. Sounes also includes solid coverage of the sex-discrimination flap at the 2003 Masters. This is one of the most important sports books in recent seasons.

Don Haskins only coached in one Final Four, but it was arguably the most important such appearance in history. Haskins led the Texas Western Miners in 1966 when the team started an all-African-American lineup against an all-white Kentucky team in the final. The result has been called the Brown v. Board of Education of college basketball. Texas Western (which changed its name to the University of Texas at El Paso the following summer) won the national title, and segregated teams were instantly on their way out.

That game was the subject of a recent movie that shares the title of Haskins’ autobiography, Glory Road. Haskins, a no-frills personality if there ever was one, tells the overdue story about how a team from El Paso came out of virtually nowhere to change the game forever. Haskins loved to coach, and he liked to win. He did both with boys’ and girls’ prep teams, and won several hundred games once he took over at Texas Western.

Haskins has a simple yet eloquent explanation as to why his team had five black starters: I just started my best players. Isn’t that what coaching is all about? It didn’t occur to him to do anything else. It’s nice to get his memories on paper in this entertaining memoir, written with Dan Wetzel.

Budd Bailey works in the sports department of the Buffalo News.

Prolific sportswriter John Feinstein is back with Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four. The book is structured around a typical week at the NCAA semifinals and finals, but that’s merely a framework to let Feinstein talk to some of his favorite basketball personalities and share some good stories. Feinstein obviously enjoys the company of basketball people, and he gets them to open up. Everyone from Bill Bradley to Mike Krzyzewski to a UNC benchwarmer gets a chance to talk about the Final Four. The conversations go in a variety of directions, such as when former coach George Raveling explains why he owns the notes that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used in his 1963 I Have a Dream speech in Washington, D.C. (Raveling was a bodyguard who stood behind King during the speech).

The format also gives Feinstein a chance to express a few opinions along the way. For example, he rips the concept of a play-in game, in which the 64th and 65th-ranked teams square off away from the rest of the tournament (the game is played in Dayton, Ohio) for the chance to get beaten up by a top seed in the first round. Feinstein would rather see the field simply go back to 64, or failing that, have the last two at-large teams meet for a full-fledged spot in the Big Dance.

If I had the chance to trail anyone around the Final Four, Feinstein would be near the top of my list. Since that won’t happen, this book is an excellent substitute.

Budd Bailey works in the sports department of the Buffalo News.

Mark Kingwell combines philosophy and fishing with aplomb in Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life. I confess that I am not a fisherman, so I come to this book with an outsider’s eye, as one enticed but not converted. What I see is enticing in itself, for this is not a book about fishing (as the author proclaims in his first chapter), but about life, with fishing as its lure. The book runs about from here to there, rather like a trout racing with the line in his mouth, back and forth willy-nilly across the river, occasionally leaping high into the air in moments of startling beauty, occasionally diving deep beneath the surface into pools of insight. Throughout, Catch and Release plays mostly midway beneath the air and the deep, flashing through the reader’s mind as if at play, delighting just in the moment of being there. A bit, the author would suggest, like fishing.

Howard Shirley is a writer and father in Nashville.

On the first Saturday in May, sports fans look toward Churchill Downs, where last year the fantasy of a lowly longshot beating the odds turned into reality. The tale of this unlikely Kentucky Derby winner is told in Funny Cide: How a Horse, a Trainer, a Jockey, and a Bunch of High School Buddies Took on the Sheiks and Bluebloods . . . and Won (Putnam, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 0399151796). It’s an exhilarating story of how 10 friends traveling in rented school buses instead of limousines, eating hamburger instead of steak, and guzzling beer rather than sipping champagne snared racing’s biggest prize. No gelding had won the Kentucky Derby since 1929, and no New York-bred horse had ever won it, but Funny Cide’s owners from upstate New York showed that a relatively cheap horse with a modest pedigree could defeat the most expensive horseflesh.

Collaborating with the principals, Sally Jenkins, co-author of champion cyclist Lance Armstrong’s best-selling It’s Not About the Bike, also tells the story of Funny Cide’s jockey JosŽ Santos, once the nation’s leading jockey who was bouncing back from injuries, divorce and debt. “This is the one,” Santos had confided to his agent a year before the Kentucky Derby. “This is the one.” As a three-year-old, Funny Cide won only two of eight starts, but those victories were in the Derby and the Preakness, the first two legs of the Triple Crown. Millions of middle-income fans, feeling they owned a piece of the horse, generated a surge of excitement for the sport as the third leg, the Belmont Stakes, approached. Funny Cide lost that race on a sloppy track and as he slowly headed back to the barn area with his head down, hundreds of thousands of bettors at Belmont Park applauded him and booed the winner.

Horse racing’s goal is simple: If your horse crosses the finish line first, you win. However, attaining that goal is more complicated, as we see in Jane Smiley’s A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck. A versatile writer whose previous works include the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres and the best-selling comic novel, Horse Heaven, Smiley now turns with unbridled enthusiasm to the realities of a sport/industry, citing scores of personal experiences. Her theories linking equine thought processes and emotions to human actions are intriguing.

Smiley offers a sage observation about young women who fall in love with horses and give up virtually everything else as she did. She writes: “Someday, we would have boyfriends, husbands, children, careers that’s what horses are a substitute for, according to adult theorists. But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitutes for horses.” Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an expert on horses that lose.