George Peper ’72 on Sports Memoirs

In the new book George Peper ’72 co-authored, Rainmaker, golf “superagent” Hughes Norton tells his story. As Tiger Woods’ first agent, he made it as big as you can in golf and enjoyed incredible success — until his marriage fell apart and he was ousted from the agency he himself had helped build. PAW asked Peper, a magazine editor and author who has written 19 books, to recommend three more great sports memoirs, and he suggested these.

Image

Tiger, Tiger

By James Patterson

Think what you may about the literary merits of James Patterson, he isn’t the world’s bestselling author by accident. No one is more savvy at choosing sellable subjects (he’s written about the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Jeffrey Epstein, to name a few), and as a former ad man, he knows how to market the heck out of everything he does. This just-published portrait of Tiger Woods — while hardly a definitive biography— covers everything, is relentlessly entertaining in the fast-paced Patterson style (87 chapters in 430 pages), and includes a few stories you will not have seen elsewhere.    

Image

Open

By Andre Agassi 

It’s been 25 years since he completed the tennis grand slam (and 15 years since this book appeared) but both Andre Agassi and his life story remain compelling. Open could not be a more apt title — in contrast to most sports memoirs, there’s no self-promotion or false modesty, just a brutally candid and detailed look at his life and struggles on the court and off. Read this one for the prose, too. Ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer, who teamed with Prince Harry to write Spare, is one of my idols.  

Image

Seabiscuit

By Laura Hillenbrand 

This one may not have a two-legged protagonist, but it has everything else. As entertaining as the Tiger book, as penetrating and well-crafted as the Agassi memoir, it is the triumphant story of an ungainly horse and the unlikely owner-trainer-jockey trio that molded him into both a cultural icon and the inspiration for a nation struggling to recover from hard times. Both intimate and panoramic, harrowing and joyful, this is a wire-to-wire winner. If you can’t find time for the book, at least stream the equally riveting movie.