I appreciate all of you who wrote in your recommendations for best sports book you ever read. If you don’t mind, I’ll take the liberty to add a few titles. I list these thinking you may look for them and enjoy them.

George Plimpton was a good writer and a unique sportswriter. He wrote as an outsider and that is often an advantage. Here are three Plimpton books I love, all books describing him participating in the event:

Shadow Box — about boxing with Archie Moore

Paper Lion — about playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions

Out of My League — about pitching at Yankee Stadium. (I love this little book).

You might like “Shoeless Joe” by W.P. Kinsella. The movie “Field of Dreams” came from this novel.

Also, A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein — his Bobby Knight portrait.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And here’s an up-and-comer: “Play Their Hearts Out” by George Dohrmann. This is an extreme closeup of youth basketball, at how these kids get identified very young and often get used up by the system. It focuses mostly on a coach, Joe Keller, and a player, Demetrius Walker in an intimate narrative that never lets up.

Personal note: George was a student of mine at University of San Francisco in the master’s program for creative writing. So, I directed this book in its first incarnation. To say I directed it is a stretch. George already had won the Pulitzer Prize before we ever met, so mostly he would turn in chapters and I would say, yes, yes, brilliant, and he would go about his business on his way to his master’s. He writes for si.com, and this book is a pleasure and it was an honor for me to be involved with it.