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.

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. 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 (Knopf, $22, 288 pages, ISBN 1400040582). 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.

Is there anything more American than horse racing? Anything as classy and earthy? Down on Jim Squires’ Kentucky horse farm, blue-jean clad millionaires mix with rough-talking horse handlers, all of them victims of Derby Fever, a personality disorder that overtakes people who spend too much time around thoroughbreds.

Squires, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune, brings all the black arts of journalism he learned at the big city paper to Horse of a Different Color, a tale that unfolds his passion for both horses and women. Squires is shifty in the way he spins his story, burying his own identity the way a skilled journalist sometimes buries the lead. He refers to himself in the third person, as though he were a skeptical reporter rather than a passionate participant. He never uses his given name, but instead riddles the reader with a string of nicknames like breeding genius, underbidder and Two Bucks guy. Horse of a Different Color revolves around the breeding, selling and training of Monarchos, a colt whose athletic prowess the author predicted when he was born. Monarchos’ career is far from guaranteed, however. Underpedigreed, he fails at auction when an x-ray turns up a bone lesion on his hip. His lineage is snubbed at the Saratoga Springs Derby, and he’s ranked as an outside chance at the big event the Kentucky Derby. With one eye on Monarchos, Squires leads his readers through the labyrinth of the thoroughbred horse industry. It’s a high-stakes world with huge gambles, crushing losses and unexpected windfalls that literally save the farm a complex, often contradictory world where traders deliberately overpay for a horse to stir up interest in its prospects, where an owner may buy her own horse at auction just to protect its reputation, where Japanese tycoons and Middle Eastern sheiks vie with Kentucky breeders to produce a champion. It’s an industry in which the proverbial dark horse the one nobody’s seriously betting on may steal the trophy. Like so many of the blueblooded beasts he writes about, Squires’ new book is a winner. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

Baseball has always been a game of numbers. Alongside the sepia-toned picture of a ballplayer, there’s often a number writ large, with which the ballplayer will forever be linked. Babe Ruth? 714. Hank Aaron? 755. Ted Williams? .406. Roger Maris? 61*. But just as sepia tones gave way to brilliant color, the numbers of the past are giving way to the numbers of the future, in the biggest revolution to hit baseball since Jackie Robinson shattered the color barrier.

That revolution is taking place in baseball’s managerial front offices, and its manifesto is Baseball Prospectus 2004, a comprehensive annual guide to player performance for managers and fans alike. During the last nine years, Baseball Prospectus has grown from a fringe publication to a best-selling reference book, and has become the bible that MLB execs swear on. But is it just about the numbers? “Absolutely not,” says Joe Sheehan, co-author of Baseball Prospectus 2004, “it’s about the game on the field. We approach this first and foremost as fans. The numbers are only interesting because they help us understand the game better. And as we understand the game better, we appreciate it more and more.” The size of the book can be daunting at first glance. “Every year, this is an enormous book, but it has to be,” says co-author Gary Huckabay. “The essays on each team, analysis and comments on more than 1,500 players and special interest essays on the game mean we end up with a bunch of material. It’s always an interesting season from October until press time. But it’s all driven by a love of the game. Yes, the nation’s 30 million fantasy baseball players love the book, but there’s something in here for every baseball fan.” Have the Yankees’ off-season moves made the upcoming season less exciting? “Forget it,” says Huckabay. “The only thing certain in baseball is that anything can happen between the lines. Let’s play ball.”

While not on a par with the aforementioned legends on the baseball diamond, Frank Edwin “Tug” McGraw (who died from brain cancer in January) was nevertheless a hero to his fans in New York and Philadelphia. Ya Gotta Believe, written with Don Yaeger, is more than a recap of McGraw’s athletic glories. It is a frank description of family dysfunction, despair (he was diagnosed late in life with bipolar disorder) and redemption. McGraw tells of his life as a typical pampered athlete, to whom women were “tomatoes.” It was during one of his liaisons that he fathered a son whose identity he denied for many years. That son grew up to be country music superstar Tim McGraw. The reconciliation between father and son makes Ya Gotta Believe (the title was McGraw’s oft-repeated rallying cry for the 1973 pennant-winning Mets) one of the more honest sports books in many years. An epilogue describes McGraw’s final days, spent in a Tennessee cabin with his son, Tim, by his side.

While other books may focus on disparate aspects of the game, biographies of baseball greats provide an educational and entertaining look at the way we were, warts and all.