The Paolantonio Report: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Teams, Coaches, and Moments in NFL History, by Sal Paolantonio with Reuben Frank, is yet another fan item, but one designed to spur controversy and armchair debate. Paolantonio, a sportswriter and ESPN fixture for years, compiles subjective lists of the NFL’s big on-the-field moments and movers and shakers, categorizing his coverage by underrated and overrated. Chapters are divided into player positions, coaches, teams, Super Bowl performances and Hall of Famers. For example, quarterbacks Joe Namath, Brett Favre and Terry Bradshaw are dubbed overrated, while QBs Len Dawson and Ken Anderson achieve an underrated grade, with Paolantonio running through career stats and accomplishments and putting them into contemporary perspective. The idea here is to start the discussion, of course, and this book will be handy to have around on Sunday afternoons for reference, or for simple diversion during those lengthy TV timeouts.

Former star NFL running back Jerome Bettis won a Super Bowl ring following the 2005 season, then bowed out of the game after 13 years of consistent excellence with the Rams and Steelers. Bettis is probably headed for the Hall of Fame, and since retirement has tried to make a go of it in broadcasting. The Bus: My Life In and Out of a Helmet is Bettis’ life story, co-authored by Gene Wojciechowski, one of ESPN.com’s better contributors. Essentially, this is a straightforward pro forma treatment, typical of the as-told-to sports genre. The prose isn’t scintillating with Wojciechowski striving to keep his subject’s conversational voice front and center but Bettis’ tale of youthful behavioral struggles in Detroit (gangs, drugs) followed by college greatness at Notre Dame and his subsequently eventful pro career will doubtlessly rope in committed football fans.

Tom Callahan, author of last season’s excellent Johnny U, returns with The GM: The Inside Story of a Dream Job and the Nightmares That Go with It, in which he chronicles the final year in the working life of recently retired NFL executive Ernie Accorsi. Callahan’s narrative is equally split between biography and the specific events of the 2006 football season, as Accorsi winds up his impressive career as general manager of the New York Giants. Readers get a strong sense of Accorsi’s humble Hershey, Pennsylvania, roots; the friendships and professional loyalties he developed over the years; and his stints doing media relations, player evaluations and head honcho decision-making for his various college and pro employers, which have also included Penn State, the Baltimore Colts and the Cleveland Browns. Callahan’s fly-on-the-wall presence takes us into the inner workings of the Giants’ front office, and Accorsi frankly relates the pitfalls and politics that go into the process of hiring and firing coaches, drafting college talent, dealing with player contracts in the age of the salary cap and negotiating the myriad unexpected personal challenges involving ownership and the NFL as an organization. In many ways, this volume will have special attraction for today’s Giants fans, but Accorsi’s status as a definite survivor of the NFL wars, and his keen historical viewpoint will engender broader general interest as well.

Austin Murphy’s Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) finds the veteran Sports Illustrated writer traipsing across the country throughout last year’s college football season. He offers a lively you are there diary-like account of his journeys to all the big Division I programs, featuring in-depth analysis of the various teams’ fortunes, including important wins and critical losses, all leading up to the post-season bowl games. Interview focus with a distinctly human-interest slant is on the young athletes (the stars and the lesser-known), but is more so on the high-profile coaches such as Pete Carroll at USC, Charlie Weis at Notre Dame and Urban Meyer at Florida. Murphy’s essentially chronological reportage eventually zeroes in on the Bowl Championship Series and Florida’s title-winner over Ohio State, yet he saves the very best for last via a sit-down visit with the key players responsible for underdog Boise State’s stirring and jarringly spectacular victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, without doubt one of the greatest games in the annals of the college gridiron.

Having catapulted over my handlebars on too many occasions to count (with two broken collarbones to mark my mishaps) and having met my share of dogs, coyotes, peacocks, cougars, bears and bulls on the back roads of Northern California, I feel a deep kinship with the 27 cyclist- sufferers who offer up their bruised but mostly undaunted spirits in Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures.

True, I have not had a live rat caught in my front spokes ("Riding Tandem with Rodent"). Nor have I sought to repair a flat with dental floss ("Genius, Not Genius"). Or taken a seriously wrong path while mountain biking in Bolivia ("The Jungle is Hungry"). Or, for that matter, used a bike ride as a sort of grand treasure hunt among rural junk piles ("Lost and Found in Boise, Idaho"). But I really, truly catch these writers’ drifts.

Most of these mostly short (two- to seven-page) vignettes have a wry joke-is-on-me tone with that blend of steely bravado and self-deprecating humor you find at the third rest stop of a century on a drizzly day. Some pieces are historical: "Iron Riders," for example, tells the history of a seemingly crazy 19th-century attempt to turn Buffalo Soldiers into bicycle cavalry. Some strike a more somber note: "The Shock and Numbness Are Starting to Set In" tells of a bike tour leader who sees sweet, elderly cyclists in her charge killed by criminally inattentive drivers. The volume also contains some wince-inducing photos in its "Bike Crash Photo Gallery."

All in all, Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures proves an interesting read for cyclists and armchair cyclists alike. These riders’ pain is our gain.

John Feinstein’s latest, Tales from Q School: Inside Golf’s Fifth Major, finds the noted sportswriter in characteristic investigative mode. The PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament ( Q School ) is a grueling annual event in which both aspiring and erstwhile pro golfers compete for precious few available slots on the PGA Tour. Feinstein covers the 2005 Q School in a narrative rich with round-by-round reportage and engaging stories about the participants from fresh-faced guys right out of college to former champs like Larry Mize, who won the 1987 Masters but, now in his late 40s, willingly suffers the somewhat ignominious Q School regimen in order to return to the greens of his past glory. Feinstein’s general theme is that, in its own way, Q School is more inherently dramatic than any major tournament, mainly because, for these players, there is no tomorrow. Serious fans of the pro game will find this an engrossing read.

Former golf pro Steve Eubanks’ Golf Freek: One Man’s Quest to Play as Many Rounds of Golf as Possible. For Free. offers a marvelous series of adventures in which the author, trading on his connections, set out to play rounds of golf either on courses new to his experience or with amazing golf personages. Eubanks’ travels take him from the foothills of the Himalayas to Zurich, Switzerland, from the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama to the Yatera Seca Golf Course near the Guant‡namo naval base in Cuba. Typified by sharp wit and indelible good will, Eubanks’ Everyman-style memoir serves up keen reflections about the game but, more importantly, delivers ripe tales of fascinating folks, such as blind golfer David Meader, Korean female golfer Jeong Jang, retired pro Al Geiberger and the irrepressible Leo Luken, an 88-year-old legend who has shot his age more than 500 times. A poignant family encounter involving Eubanks’ dad and his Marine recruit son concludes the text, and helps humanize what is otherwise a delightful busman’s holiday of a book.

The U.S. of the 1950s has traditionally been viewed as wholesome and peaceful, dominated by the sober presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. Ike’s recreational penchant contributed mightily to that image, since he completed more than 800 rounds of golf during his eight years in the White House. Catherine M. Lewis’ Don’t Ask What I Shot: How Eisenhower’s Love of Golf Helped Shape 1950’s America makes interesting contributions both to golf lore and to sociopolitical history. In eminently readable prose, Lewis profiles Eisenhower the man, the key events during his terms in office and the general cultural landscape, which encompassed a nation transitioning from an era of white male dominance to a more pluralistic society. The serious analysis of Ike’s presidential conduct including his conflicts with Southern politicians over school integration is balanced nicely with a sense of America’s broadening golf fanaticism, typified by Ike’s ongoing affiliations with celebrities and pro athletes such as Bob Hope, Arnold Palmer and Bobby Jones. We also learn plenty about Ike’s golf game: He was lucky to break 90, he took many a mulligan, and he was not averse to sending Secret Service agents out into the rough in search of his errant tee shots. The book’s title is a quote from Ike himself, indicating that the Prez had no illusions about his struggles on the fairway.

He was christened Vincent Damon Furnier, but the world knows him as the original shock-rocker Alice Cooper, whose big ’70s hits I’m Eighteen and School’s Out launched a decades-long music career. Alice Cooper, Golf Monster: A Rock ‘n’ Roller’s 12 Steps to Becoming a Golf Addict is essentially an autobiography, charting Cooper’s journey from Michigan to Arizona to California and through his eventful showbiz life. But the memoir is equally Cooper’s account of his struggles with alcohol addiction and how a newfound passion for golf came to supplant his attraction to booze. Cooper has proudly been off the sauce for years, thus saving his personal life, but his affinity for golf may be even more obsessive. He plays hundreds of golf rounds a year, spending every available moment on the course, the result of which is sobriety and also an amazing six-handicap. He’s become one of the finest amateur golfers around, and he’s found a way to keep his still-shoulder-length hair out of harm’s way. Cooper’s book is a quirky but inspiring effort, filled with humor and sincerity.

Zack Hample is already famous for collecting nearly 3,000 baseballs all of which he caught or found at major league games. But Hample is also a writer covering the minor leagues, a blogger, a former college shortstop and a baseball instructor. Watching Baseball Smarter is a marvelously compact omnibus in which Hample neatly breaks down positions, game play, rules, strategies and slang, while also explaining the workings of team management and the way pro baseball functions at every level. And even though he’s having fun throughout, Hample is extraordinarily comprehensive in his approach. Topics that come under discussion include awards, uniform numbers, chewing tobacco, the origin of the seventh-inning stretch, statistical history, how to read a box score, how to keep a scoresheet, the umpire’s job and even what goes on at a conference on the mound. To his credit, Hample covers a lot of stuff that will serve as welcome refresher for longtime fans, and, needless to say, his book is perfect for those who are new to the game and want to get up to speed quickly. This handy reference ought to be kept near the armchair while enjoying any Saturday afternoon baseball telecast.

<b>It’s all in your head</b> University of Missouri psychology professor Mike Stadler has always had a passion for baseball. In <b>The Psychology of Baseball: Inside the Mental Game of the Major League Player</b>, he merges that interest with his academic training to turn out a rarefied investigation of where head meets heart at the highest level of the sport. Stadler succeeds at keeping the writing lively, while also dropping in research results and some necessary terminology in trying to help readers understand the psychological aspects of batting, fielding and pitching, with further examination of elusive subjects such as hitting streaks and clutch performances. He offers plenty of examples of famous players and how their demonstrated abilities fit into his conclusions. The text winds up with a fascinating deconstruction of the nature of fandom. This book offers something a little different from the usual baseball fare, and its original approach puts a new slant on how to view the summer game.

New York Yankees outfielder Hideki Matsui is coming off an injury-shortened 2006 season. In 2007, he hopes to rebound to the form that initially brought him Western stardom in 2003, his first year in American baseball after an impressive career in Japan. Hideki Matsui: Sportsmanship, Modesty, and the Art of the Home Run is a brief but intimate bio of the man known as Godzilla. It’s written by Shizuka Ijuin, an award-winning Japanese novelist who knew Matsui during his Japanese playing days. Matsui, his stern exterior notwithstanding, comes off here as a dedicated ballplayer and an honorable individual. Ijuin paints a portrait of an uncommonly determined and thoughtful athlete who struggled mightily with his decision to leave the Yomiuri Giants and stake out a claim as an elite player in the even more competitive American major leagues. Ijuin also lets readers in on Matsui’s penchant for charitable giving and the genuine humility with which he has shared his wealth. The book includes a nice selection of photos of Matsui from childhood to the present day.

The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals were one of baseball’s most colorful gangs of players, a combative bunch who rallied at season’s end to overtake the New York Giants for the National League crown and then proceeded to defeat the Detroit Tigers in a storied World Series. John Heidenry’s The Gashouse Gang is a solidly researched and warmly told account of that team and season, with special focus on star hurler Dizzy Dean, who won 30 games and provided newspapermen with reams of copy that recorded his attention-getting antics both on and off the field. Other Cardinals who come alive in Heidenry’s well-written text are Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Frankie Frisch, Joe Medwick and Dean’s younger brother, Paul, who, as a rookie, won 19 games and played a critical role in the team’s success. Cardinals honcho Branch Rickey the same man who later ushered Jackie Robinson into baseball is a key figure in this story as well, emerging as a skilled front-office manipulator of men and money.