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.

For more than 20 years, Hank Aaron quietly went about his work, doing all the things that Mantle and Mays did, but with less media attention. That is, until he came within striking distance of the most prestigious record in baseball: Babe Ruth’s 714 lifetime home runs. The two seasons (1973-74) Aaron spent closing in on Ruth’s mark should have been a time of excitement and joyful anticipation. Instead, it was a horror. In recognition of the 30th anniversary of the feat, Tom Stanton takes a look at the withering pressures the slugger faced in Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America.

The increasing media focus and demands on his time as well as the daily grind of being an aging athlete were compounded by the small mindedness of those who believed that Aaron, as an African American, had no right to such acclaim. Instead of enjoying the ride, it reached the point where Aaron told reporters, “I want to get this nightmare over with.” Stanton mixes sport with social commentary as he describes the racism Aaron faced, including death threats to himself and his family, hate mail and the inexplicable indifference of baseball’s commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

If Mantle was brute force, Mays was style and grace. His ability to stay healthier than his Yankee counterpart allowed him to put up superior numbers. Charles Einstein chronicled his long-playing story in Willie’s Time: Baseball’s Golden Age, a book first published in 1979 that came to be regarded as a classic of baseball writing. This year, Southern Illinois University Press is releasing a 25th anniversary edition.

Einstein combines the name-dropping witticisms of a gossip columnist with the keen analysis of a history professor, citing dozens of sources to illustrate his observations on Mays, whose time in the big leagues spanned five presidential administrations. The author discusses the parallel maturation of the ballplayer and America, but concentrates mostly on the pernicious racial inequities suffered by Mays and other African-American ballplayers. Rather than being heavy-handed with indignation, Einstein manages to infuse a gentle sense of humor into even these ugly situations.

For years the debate raged: Mantle or Mays? They both debuted in 1951 and their careers mirrored each other for more than a decade both even had songs written about them. Such memories are the basis of two books, one new and one a re-release of an old favorite.

As a sportswriter, Maury Allen covered Mantle during his playing days; Bill Liederman was Mantle’s partner in the popular New York restaurant that bears his name. Between them, they’ve collected a half-century of high- and low-lights in Our Mickey: Cherished Memories of an American Icon. Allen contributes anecdotes from Mantle’s teammates and opponents, citing celebrated feats of athletic ability in a lifetime diminished by injury and alcoholism. Liederman came into Mantle’s life relatively late, but his stories still reflect the awe in which even the rich and famous held the Yankee slugger. Celebrities such as Henry Kissinger, Billy Crystal, Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton are among dozens who recount what Mantle meant to them and to the American psyche.

All due modesty aside, Ted Williams considered himself among the greatest hitters who ever lived, and he was not alone in that assessment. Leigh Montville takes a fresh look at the Red Sox slugger in Ted Williams: The Biography of an American Hero.

Williams was a true hero, and not just in the hyperbolic lexicon of the sports world. He put in two stints as a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea and helped to establish several charities. Montville offers numerous accounts of Williams’ friendship and generosity to the “little man” over the years. But for all his success, Williams’ family life was a dismal disappointment: three failed marriages and a manipulative son who, even as Williams was dying, sought ways to cash in on his father’s fame. These antics continued after Williams’ death, when his son had his father’s remains stored at a cryogenics lab, a sad coda to the life of this proud and vibrant personality. Montville’s extraordinary insight and access into Williams’ life outside the sports spotlight makes this a fascinating volume sure to pique the interest of fans.

Super Bowl XL (that’s 40 for the Roman numeral-challenged) will be played in Detroit on Feb. 5, 2006. Those of us who’ve been alive for all of them might be feeling our age, yet there’s something about this sporting event that makes everyone feel young. The quintessential American sports extravaganza not only celebrates the nation’s finest pro football teams but also has morphed into an unparalleled commercial and cultural touchstone, with its obsessive celebrity-watching and exorbitantly compelling television advertising. Edited by Ken Leiker and Craig Ellenport, The Super Bowl: An Official Retrospective is a pictorially rich history of the game in all its aspects, featuring an informative running text and six longer essays by men who’ve won the Big One : Bart Starr, Phil Simms, Terry Bradshaw, Tom Brady, Doug Williams and Roger Staubach.

The mostly color photos capture the Super Bowl’s storied players, coaches and key moments, including a series of stop-action sequential shots of legendary game-winning drives, stalwart goal-line stands and critical individual efforts. Among the big-play heroics portrayed are those of Hall of Famers Joe Montana, John Riggins and John Stallworth, as well as lesser-known players like the 49ers’ Dan Bunz, the Rams’ Mike Jones and the Steelers’ Reggie Harrison, each of whom found a moment in the sun in the biggest game of their lives.

Since the Super Bowl is commonly known for the incredible hype and show-biz pizzazz that accompanies it, this volume also weighs in appropriately with pertinent coverage of thematic special events and the pop stars who have made appearances either singing the National Anthem or as halftime entertainment. A super-cool DVD, In Their Own Words, accompanies the book.

For pure sports journalism, one would be challenged to find a finer book than John Taylor’s The Rivalry: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Golden Age of Basketball. Taylor, a New York magazine editor and regular Esquire contributor, tells the concurrent tales of basketball’s most famous big men: Russell, who led the Boston Celtics to numerous championships, and the irrepressible and legendary Chamberlain, who usually eclipsed Russell in individual statistics but was hard-pressed to defeat him in a big game. Taylor relates his subjects’ life stories, then deftly interweaves their career accounts, especially as the two behemoths squared off in critical NBA playoff encounters. Russell comes to life as a proud, defiant, determined and hardworking African-American man with a keen social conscience, while Chamberlain emerges as a gregarious but also sometimes-broody black superstar with a chip on his shoulder and a sense of showmanship that may have eclipsed his desire to win. The additional portraits of team owners, players and coaches, in particular the Celtics’ Red Auerbach, help to provide needed perspective about the inner workings of the NBA, particularly through the 1950s and ’60s. Sports history at its best.

Martin Brady is making out his Christmas list at home in Nashville.

Mark Twain once famously remarked that "Golf is a good walk spoiled." Harsh words perhaps, but there’s no denying that, as sports go, this one is singularly exasperating. Nevertheless, each day people travel to their local greens in search of new adventures. According to the National Golf Foundation, over 26 million players took to nearly 17,000 courses last year. Instead of Mike, many people would rather "be like Tiger."

At the end of a vigorous round, golfers like nothing better than to gather at the clubhouse, the 19th hole, to regale each other with stories of their exploits on the course. Like fishermen, they compare gear, swap tall tales and continually try to one-up each other. If your favorite golfer needs material for these clubhouse confabs, the season’s best golf books offer many gift-giving possibilities.

At the top of every golfer’s wish list is the blockbuster golf book of the year, Tiger Woods’ How I Play Golf. With help from the editors of Golf Digest, Woods has compiled a thorough treatise on the basic aspects of the game, from putting to smoking the driver. As all duffers know, half the game is mental, so Woods also offers tips on how to handle problems, how to stay in control and how to practice winning psychology. Woods is known for his tireless approach to training, and he shares insights on that subject as well. The volume is loaded with helpful step-by-step color photographs of Tiger’s techniques and text that is neither too technical nor too patronizing.

The problem with books written by sports superstars is the false expectation that reading them might actually make one as good as the author. But keeping the title in mind how Tiger plays golf will help maintain a sense of perspective about the benefits of reading this excellent guide.

A different kind of instruction can be found in The Golfer’s Guide to the Meaning of Life: Lessons I’ve Learned from My Life on the Links by Gary Player. Rather than micro-managing your game by telling you how to stand or grip the clubs, Player, one of the troika of golf greats that included Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, discusses issues that usually receive less consideration: success, gratitude, fear, sportsmanship, motivation, goals and change.

Player is a firm believer in doing things the right way. He recalls a time when he could have gotten away with a minor rules infraction. Instead, he reported his innocent error and was disqualified from a tournament he easily could have won. "If I had not turned myself in, I would have had to live the rest of my life with the knowledge that I had cheated. . . . Much better is the feeling I have today that even though I left a trophy and check behind . . . I still have my dignity and honor."

Player’s focus isn’t on learning the techniques of the game, but rather on what the game has taught him about life. "[Golf] leaves us no choice but to accept the good with the bad and to move on to the next shot. . . . That’s the way life is, and the grand old game of golf will never let you forget it."

While Player has been around the course a time or two, Darren Kilfara is a relative rookie. A student at Harvard, he somehow convinced the history department that a year in Scotland, the birthplace of golf, would be beneficial to his studies. They fell for it, and Kilfara was off to St. Andrews. His sports-driven coming-of-age story is told with appealing style and insight in A Golfer’s Education.

It’s easy to see how readers might find themselves a bit jealous of Kilfara, who uses his year abroad to play as much golf as he can while earning academic credit. Along the way he manages to learn life lessons from the everyday people he meets in the quaint towns of Scotland (including a new love interest). Part travelogue and part memoir, Kilfara’s book paints such a charming picture of his temporary home that some readers might be tempted to book their own passage to play a few rounds on the bonnie shores.

Ron Kaplan is a freelance writer who lives a good "drive" away from the Montclair Country Club in New Jersey.