Sports / Recreation

Epic moments in modern sports are masterfully paired with their fine art doppelgangers in this incredible compilation of side-by-side images that sports fans will marvel at. Featuring photographs from basketball, baseball, softball, football, soccer, tennis, hockey, golf, the Olympics, and more, matched with paintings and other pieces of historical art that mirror them, the undeniable similarities will keep you turning the pages!

BELOVED ACCOUNT, BRAND NEW CONTENT: From the popular Instagram and X account @ArtButMakeItSports comes this entertaining volume full of fan favorites and brand new content, sure to keep you mesmerized.

WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETES: This collection contains some of the most famous moments and greatest athletes spanning the history of professional sports. You'll find an array of favorites within these pages!

ULTIMATE GIFT FOR SPORTS FANS: Without a doubt, this book will have the sports fans in your life laughing out loud! Win the day with this awesome gift for friends and loved ones for birthday, anniversary, holiday, Father's Day, Mother's Day, or any day you're catching a game together.

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As he guides you through the fundamentals of the proper grip, posture, alignment, and swing, Utley will overhaul and improve your stroke by putting feel back into your game. This definitive book also provides:
- A complete primer on club design, with tips for finding the putter most in tune with the nuances of your swing
- A guide to the sensory aspects of a good putt, from grip pressure to impact response to the way a putt should sound
- Simple steps for reading greens accurately, every time
- Drills to commit your putting stroke to muscle memory and overcome the tics that can knock your putts off line
- Cures for the mental hurdles you'll face on the short grass

Join Andrea Marcolongo, renowned classicist and one of today's most original thinkers on antiquity, for an inspiring journey as she learns to run--and to live--like a Greek.

Why do we run? To what end, all the effort and pain? Wherefore this love of muscle, speed, and sweat? The Greeks were the first to ask these questions, the first to suspend war, work, politics, to enjoy public celebrations of athletic prowess. They invented sport and they were also the first to understand how physical activity connected to our mental well-being.

After a lifetime spent with her head and heart in the books trying to think like a Greek, at a professional and personal crossroads, Andrea Marcolongo set out to learn how to run like a Greek. In doing so, she deepened her understanding of the ancient civilization she has spent decades studying and discovered more about herself than she could ever have dreamed.

In this spirited, generous, and engaging book, Marcolongo shares her erudition and her own journey to understanding that a healthy body is, in more ways than one might guess, a healthy mind.

Veteran golfers know that the secret to a lower score is a solid short game, but mastering those small strokes can be maddening--even for the pros. One of golf's most revered instructors, Stan Utley now reveals the step-by-step tactics behind his revolutionary short-game techniques in The Art of the Short Game.

After introducing readers to his groundbreaking philosophy that explains why most players don't see all the shots available to them near the green, Utley moves on to shatter conventional wisdom about stance, grip, and ball position. From choosing the right clubs (including a checklist of must-haves that should always be in your bag) to spin reduction during chipping and fearless sand play, The Art of the Short Game demystifies the most aggravating shots on the links. Though Utley's primer features a full set of drills, accompanied by more than seventy-five photos, his approach is far removed from the monotonous, mechanical instruction of yesteryear.

Giving a time-tested secret weapon to every golfer at every level, Utley's short-game methods turn trouble shots into triumph.

"As They See 'Em" is an insider's look at the largely unknown world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and the very occasional woman) who make sure America's favorite pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and true. Bruce Weber, a "New York Times" reporter, not only interviewed dozens of professional umpires but entered their world, trained to become an umpire, and then spent a season working games from Little League to big league spring training.

"As They See 'Em" is Weber's entertaining account of this experience as well as a lively exploration of what amounts to an eccentric secret society, with its own customs, its own rituals, its own colorful vocabulary. (Know what a "whacker" is? A "pole bender"? "Rat cheese"? Think you could "strap it on" or "take the stick"?) He explains the arcane set of rules by which umps work and details the exasperating, tortuous path that allows only a select few to graduate from the minor leagues to the majors. He describes what it's like to work in a ballpark where not only the fans but the players, the managers and coaches, the announcers, the team owners, and even the league presidents, resent them -- and vice versa. And he asks, quite sensibly, why anyone would do a job that offers the chance to earn only blame and never credit.

Weber reveals how umps are tutored to work behind the plate, what they learn to watch for on the bases, and how proper positioning for every imaginable situation on the field is drilled into them. He describes how they're counseled to respond -- or not -- to managers who are screaming at them from inches away with purposeful inanity, and tells us exactly which "magic" words result in an automatic ejection. Writing with deep knowledge of and affection for baseball, he delves into such questions as: Why isn't every strike created equal? Is the ump part of the game or outside of it? Why doesn't a tie go to the runner? And what do umps and managers say to each other during an argument, really?

In addition to professional umpires, Weber spoke to current and former players including Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, Tom Glavine, Barry Zito, Paul Lo Duca, Kenny Lofton, Ron Darling, and Robin Yount, as well as former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox, Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland, and many others in the professional game. He attended the 2006 and 2007 World Series, interviewing the umpire crews who called those games and who spoke candidly about the pressure of being scrutinized by millions -- maybe billions! -- of fans around the world, all of them armed with television's slo-mo, hi-def instant replay. As fans know, in 2008, a rash of miscalled home run balls led baseball, for the first time, to use replay to help big league umps make their decisions.Weber discusses these events and the umpires' surprising reaction to them.

Packed with fascinating reportage that reveals the game as never before and answers the kinds of questions that fans, exasperated by the cliches of conventional sports commentary, pose to themselves around the television set, Bruce Weber's "As They See 'Em" is a towering grand slam.

Revolving around fascinating, complex characters, The Assist is a captivating narrative of a basketball team in pursuit of a championship that also drills down into the legacy of desegregation and explores issues of education, family, and race. O'Brien is a middle-aged white guy coaching an all-black team playing in an all-white neighborhood that three decades ago was at the center of the busing wars dividing cities across the country -- a time and place indelibly described in J. Anthony Lukas's powerful book Common Ground. It's the inspiring story of a man who makes a difference, and of boys surmounting nearly impossible odds; it is also the story of the ones who don't make it, and why.

While basketball didn't take up residence in the White House in January 2009, the game nonetheless played an outsized role in forming the man who did. In The Audacity of Hoop, celebrated sportswriter Alexander Wolff examines Barack Obama, the person and president, by the light of basketball. This game helped Obama explore his identity, keep a cool head, impress his future wife, and define himself as a candidate.

Wolff chronicles Obama's love of the game from age 10, on the campaign trail--where it eventually took on talismanic meaning--and throughout his two terms in office. More than 125 photographs illustrate Obama dribbling, shooting free throws, playing pickup games, cooling off with George Clooney, challenging his special assistant Reggie Love for a rebound, and taking basketball to political meetings. There is also an assessment of Obama's influence on the NBA, including a dawning political consciousness in the league's locker rooms.

Sidebars reveal the evolution of the president's playing style, "Baracketology"--a not-entirely-scientific art of filling out the commander in chief's NCAA tournament bracket--and a timeline charts Obama's personal and professional highlights.

Equal parts biographical sketch, political narrative, and cultural history, The Audacity of Hoop shows how the game became a touchstone in Obama's exercise of the power of the presidency.

Searching for soccer's next superstars, an audacious program called Football Dreams held tryouts for millions of 13-year-old boys across Africa. In The Away Game, Sebastian Abbot follows several of the boys as they chase their dreams in a dizzying world of rich Arab sheikhs, money-hungry agents, and soccer-mad European fans.