Alyson Rudd's Reading List

"Conor was on the tennis circuit. He rubbed shoulders with the greats of the game, like Roger Federer and so on, but he never quite made it. He had his moments in the spotlight, but it’s a grinding life being on the lower rungs. If you know somebody who’s got a kid who’s thinking of making tennis their career, they should read this book first because it’s not fun. Conor studied English literature at university and he applies a literary brain to all his experiences. There’s humour in the book, a lot of self-deprecation and insight. He’s quite open and honest. That’s one of the key things that the judging panel liked about it. He doesn’t hide anything. He clearly loves his family a lot, but they do come over as quite pushy and he accepts that you won’t achieve anything in individual sport without a pushy parent. That’s well-known. If you look at the people who win in tennis, they’re the ones who started the, ‘Oh, you have to train on Christmas day’ thing because they knew one of their competitors somewhere, aged 11, was also competing and training. You don’t have a day off at all. The Racket won, I think, because it has a little bit of everything in it. As chair of the judging panel, it does invariably cross my mind. ‘What will people think? Is this going to be a shock winner? Will people like it?’ So many people have said to me that they absolutely love this book. People who’ve read all the books on the shortlist say they hoped it would win. People who have picked it up or given it to someone because they like tennis have said, ‘Wow.’ It really is a book that spreads across the community and it’s not just for someone who’s a tennis nut. In Conor Niland you will recognize someone who has to work really hard and never quite gets there; you will understand. Yes, the Andre Agassi book probably should have won. It might have come out at the wrong time of year. That sometimes happens: a book feels like it’s been around forever and loses its freshness. But tennis books have featured on the longlist and shortlist a lot."

"It’s on the shortlist because of the quality of the writing. It’s beautifully written. Rebecca was the first black woman to represent Team GB, the British Olympic team, in the pool. Swimming is quite a difficult sport to write about. It’s pretty repetitive. It’s quite good fun at the Olympics when you’ve got a raucous crowd and you can hear the commentary over the top, and all the passion that a big sporting occasion brings. But if you strip it back, it’s relentlessly dull. It’s backwards and forwards and you can’t see the face of the person competing. They’re hidden by their goggles and the water. You’re just guessing what they might be thinking or feeling. What Rebecca does is she turns all that repetitiveness and the tough training into a form of poetry. There are passages where she’ll write about the relentlessness I’ve just described, but it sounds gorgeous. It might sound painful, but in a poetic way. She’s a black face in a sea of white faces at her college. There is the prejudice that ‘black people can’t swim’, that she has to deal with. She finds it very tough discovering her own identity in a strange world, whilst also trying to think like an elite athlete. I haven’t asked her, but I suspect there might be a narrative around her sporting career. She quit the GB team ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games: her promise fizzled out slightly. When that happens, there are invariably question marks about your commitment to the sport. In my opinion, she was trying to express, ‘This was very hard. I had so much stacked against me. I just ran out of…’ You can almost feel the air leaving her, the energy draining away towards the end of the book. It’s a way of saying, ‘This is my story. This is what it felt like from my point of view. I don’t care what it looks like from the outside—it looks like an unfulfilled ambition—but this is how difficult it is.’ She just couldn’t keep putting up with the tough training regime and the bias she perceived against her. You can learn as much from people who don’t quite make it as from those who do. That failure—although I’m sure Rebecca wouldn’t like me to call it a failure—underlines just how remarkable it is when someone does succeed. She’s showing us just how tough it is. You need those crumbs of victory to keep you going. That’s a really enjoyable element in the book—how those mini triumphs along the way help her put up with the early starts and the late finishes and the relentlessness of it."

"Yes, the Harry Edward memoir is probably the most unusual book that’s ever made the shortlist of the award in its entire history. It’s a lost memoir. He tried to get it published in the 1970s, but publishers said it wasn’t interesting enough. It’s unbelievable, anyone would think that. What you do is you accompany him through the great landmarks of history. Wherever things are happening, he turns up. It’s absolutely remarkable. Then, in the middle of it all, you’ve got him going to America, which is why it’s called When I Passed the Statue of Liberty I Became Black . He’s self-educated, very well-read, very forward-thinking, very liberal. And yet he explains the racism of going to America and just being seen as black, and therefore all you can do is wash the dishes in a restaurant. Never mind all the qualifications you’ve got. But he doesn’t write it in a bitter way at all. It’s more like, ‘Oh well, this is another little hurdle I have to get over.’ He just keeps pushing and pushing to make sure he impacts the world as much as he can. He just seems to be the most kind, lovely person that emerges from these pages, with so much to offer. I can’t list for you all the things he gets involved in. He’s just a bundle of energy. His Olympic journey is a tiny part of his bigger picture. It’s almost like competing at the Olympic Games was just one in a list of 150 things that he did in his life. It did go slightly wrong. It does sound like he probably should have won gold rather than bronze, but you can never know for sure why these things turn out the way they do. He’s a history maker in terms of the Olympics, but for him it’s just another chapter in the many chapters of a remarkable life. We’re not reading the memoir in its pure form. It has been edited with a bit of digging around in the history with things woven in to add context. But it is a memoir and who doesn’t like a lost memoir? It reads a bit like an old-fashioned Pathé newsreel. It’s very proper and he’s relentlessly upbeat. I find that quite delightful, that style. There’s not too much introspection. But you could argue it sounds like a list of your life, as opposed to going deep into it and adding texture. That’s possibly the reason it didn’t get published in the 70s. But because time has now passed, this odd style actually adds to the sense of, ‘This is a remarkable memoir by a remarkable man.’ It’s a firsthand account of what it felt like to have a whole nation judge you by the colour of your skin—when that hasn’t been the predominant way you’ve been treated up until that point. It’s quite a rare insight, isn’t it? Most people are born into their circumstances and stay within them and are constrained by them. But Harry Edward did things back to front. He was a success, and then suddenly he was washing dishes."

"Yes, she’s the double Olympic champion for Team GB. This is an updated memoir, if you like. She has written memoirs before but, crucially, in those she left out the part about being gay. The joy of this book is that you can feel Kelly as if she’s in the room with you. Her relief and happiness at being able to not hide anything from you is palpable. Although it’s a really upbeat book—it’s funny and it rollocks along—I found there to be a level of sadness there, that it took so long for her to be able to be true to herself. You might say, ‘The world isn’t like that now. You don’t have to hide your sexuality.’ But she was in the army, and the rules forbade you from being homosexual. It was something she’d been forced to hide. Then there was, ‘I’m an Olympic champion, I’m famous. Am I supposed to be a certain way? Do people expect me to be a certain type of person?’ It was doubly hard for her to come out when she was a famous figure because it had been instilled in her that what she felt was shameful. So it was a very sort of specific set of circumstances that led to her own journey about being honest about her sexuality. But it is insightful. It reminds you that when someone you know or hear about says, ‘I’m gay’ it isn’t always an easy thing to do. You’ll have close family that might judge you, as well as the wider public. You could also say, ‘Does it matter? Does anyone care?’ but if you’re hiding something, it really affects your ability to enjoy life. That’s the other message of this book. She had these wonderful moments in her life. She was beloved by the British public. The footage of her face when she crossed the finishing line is an iconic image in British society—that shocked joy and disbelief that she’d won. And yet she couldn’t really enjoy it fully, because she wasn’t being herself. In interviews, she was scared she might say something that would give it away. Now all that’s gone and she’s just open about who she is and who she loves, you can feel that she’s a much, much happier person. That makes this a nice read."

"The title of the book might confuse people: Why has he put an ‘s’ on the end of Munich? He does that because ‘Munichs’ is used as an insult, a way to taunt Manchester United fans. In 1958, a plane carrying their team back from a European competition crashed in Germany in the ice. A lot of the players on board died or were injured. It was a team that was packed full of young talent. Sir Matt Busby was the manager, and they were called the ‘Busby Babes.’ The crash wrecked the Manchester community. There is something very poignant about these very young players: one minute you’re watching them run around playing football and scoring goals, and you’re cheering them, and the next minute they’re dead. That’s hard to compute. I cried about six separate times while reading this book. It is very, very moving. It was also a strange plane crash, because some people were unscathed. They stood up and walked away wondering, ‘Oh? Something weird happened here. I don’t have my shoes on anymore.’ And a few seats further in front, their teammate was dead. There’s a lot of heroism in the book. In Manchester, Jimmy Murphy keeps the club going. That’s the element of the book that’s really intriguing if you like your football. To fulfill matches, Murphy has to find players and get a team out. He’s lost his best players. Other clubs phone him up and say, ‘If we can help you out, we will.’ But when he actually tries to get their help they say, ‘Oh well, you know, it’s not really fair, is it?’ David Peace is a fine writer. He has a very distinct style. Some people say it’s a novel, not a sports book—but it’s a curious combination of the two. His research for this book has been incredible, you cannot accuse him of going off on flights of fancy without pinning down what happened. The fiction comes in in that it’s all internal monologue. It’s about what the people involved, the survivors, were thinking, how they’re coping. That’s made up. He can’t know what their inner monologue was. But because he’s done so much research, you believe it: it has an element of truth to it. You think, ‘Why wouldn’t they be thinking that way?’ Like These Heavy Black Bones, it’s a long piece of poetry, in a way. I think it’s the most accessible of the David Peace books. Someone called it Joycean, which makes it sound like a book you would not pick up. But it’s only Joycean in that it’s lyrical and beautiful. It is very accessible. It’s a hard one. How can you recommend a book when it’s made you cry? I feel that’s an evil thing to do to someone. But if you’re thinking, ‘I might give that a miss, because it sounds like a James Joyce’ I would say, ‘No, give it a go, because it’s a very specific style and it will in some way enrich your life, even if you do cry like I did.’ This book should be compulsory reading for people who do not like Manchester United, because it would stop them taunting them at football matches about the crash. It happened a long time ago, and opposition fans do still chant it. Tragedy chanting is illegal, but people still do it. If you read this book, you would not think about it as a joke ever again."

"I wish this book had been eight times longer! It’s quite a short book, and it really should be longer. Khalida is a remarkable woman. She’s living in a society where women’s rights are virtually non-existent. She’s obviously very intelligent and has quite a progressive family. That seems to give her the bravery to be quite bolshy. She says in the book that she’s stubborn. She is very stubborn and when she gets it in her head that women should be playing football, she doesn’t give it up—even though everyone tells her it’s a terrible idea. Her family suffers, because she’s bringing them shame in the view of the society and the authorities around her, but she perseveres. If you want to read a book about battling against the odds, this is the book for you. Critics would say, ‘Why create a football team? How does that help Afghanistan women?’ For those who live outside that community and find it hard to compute just how appalling conditions are for women in Afghanistan, it allows us a point of comparison—through the vehicle of the football team that she helps to create. Women across the world, at various points in history, have found it difficult to play organized sport. We’re still only catching up in the UK. We’ve made great strides in promoting women’s football, but only in the last 15 years. Organized football was banned by the Football Association until 1971. It’s taken a long time to recover from that and for people to accept that women can play football seriously in the UK, and we’ve looked jealously across at the United States, where the women’s football teams get more attention than the men’s. Then you look across at Afghanistan, and you think, ‘Okay, you can times the problems we’ve had by a million.’ In a strict society where women are expected to do nothing at all except serve men, it’s almost unbelievable that she achieved her goal of creating a football team—although it transpires that the people who allowed that to happen were doing it to get money for grants and to look good to the outside world. There was no actual belief that women should play football. Then, when the Taliban regained power, she had to find a way to extract the women in the team from Afghanistan, because they were at high risk of being arrested. Again, that brings up moral questions: Why would you place extracting a female football player above extracting a wife and mother? Why is being a football player more important? But she got some women out and that was a great thing. Throughout it all, there is the pain she suffered, the losses she saw. Within a few sentences, you hear about her finding a goalkeeper. She tells her, ‘I think you’re really good, I’d like you to be my number one goalkeeper.’ This woman is utterly delighted but her family calls her a whore, and she sets herself on fire and dies. It’s hard to compute that life. This is why My Beautiful Sisters is a really important book. Through the vehicle of sport, you get an insight into a society that we can barely imagine. Each chapter starts with a little phrase about how beautiful football is, a mini poem reminding you of the joy of completing a pass or scoring a goal. The book never loses sight of the beauty of team sport. That’s quite an achievement, I think, against the backdrop of the societal pressures that they all suffered."

"This is an unusual book, not least in its format. You’ve got David Walsh, a renowned journalist who has done a lot of work on cycling—who did a lot to bring down Lance Armstrong and reveal the truth about his doping. He’s a very tenacious journalist. And, basically, the book is him, David Walsh, in a car with Pippa York, as they do the tour circuit, both acting as journalists. Pippa used to be known as Robert Millar, the first British rider to win a Tour de France classification, and was our greatest cyclist for a while. Then Robert Millar transitioned, to become Pippa York. So you get two stories in one. You get the pair of them driving around the tour circuit, staying in crummy hotels, meeting people involved in the tour, reminiscing about key races they’ve been part of or reported on. Then, as they drive around, David is also asking Pippa about the process of transitioning and how difficult that was. “Sporting autobiographies can be cut-and-paste affairs. For an autobiography to get on our shortlist, it can’t be that” It’s essentially Pippa York’s autobiography, but told in a completely different way, through conversation. It takes autobiography to another level. These days, for any autobiography in the running for Sports Book of the Year, it’s very important that it’s a cut above your standard sporting biography. Those still exist, and they can be pretty much cut-and-paste affairs, written with the fan in mind. It’ll have a big picture of the face of your favourite star on the cover, it will tell you when they were born, when they got their big break, how awful it was when they broke their leg, and how fantastic it was when they won gold, how they cope with retirement, whatever. It’s a bit A, B, C through to Z. For an autobiography to get on our shortlist, it can’t be that. David will prompt Pippa to explain what it was like growing up, knowing that he—at that point, ‘he’—was in the wrong body, saving up his pocket money to be able to buy girls clothes, the fear of being seen in those clothes by his classmates, and how awkward it was being discovered by his father in those clothes. Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t get that level of detail if it had been a standard autobiography. But you feel like David gets an awful lot from Pippa York in conversation. It’s a very intriguing book."

"In Jimmy Anderson’s autobiography, from the opening pages you know you’re going to get something very honest and with a good deal of reflection. We join him, having been told: ‘You’re old now, Jimmy, we don’t need you any more. Your life as a top rank cricketer is over.’ He’s sat on his own reflecting how difficult that is going to be for him. Eventually he realises that sitting on a bench looking at an empty cricket field might be a nice, not a sad thing, to do. It can prompt those feelings, what cricket gave him. Then we get his story—how, even from when he was a young child, he felt there was something in him, and he didn’t know what it was. He felt different, like he didn’t belong. That’s beautifully expressed. So we learn how cricket filled that hole in his life. It’s an interesting take on what it means to be a top class sports person. Everyone who succeeds in sport has to devote themselves to their craft. It’s more than 10,000 hours. You give your life to it. And you think, well, what makes someone want to be so focused? You get an insight into that with this book. It’s like he’s born with this need to fill something. Cricket can give him that sense of competition, camaraderie, a sense of belonging, of being needed. His ghost writer, or collaborator, Felix White is given a name check. That’s a good thing. I don’t like it when they hide who the ghost writer is. He has gone to great lengths to find Jimmy’s voice. There are autobiographies that feel like they are written for teenagers because they are so basic. This is a grown-up, reflective book. And you do need a really good ghost writer to enable someone to explore those ideas. I very much doubt that, if you’d just given Jimmy Anderson a pad and pen, he’d have constructed it this way. It would be difficult for any of us to do that. You need to collaborate, to find a way to convey the story to the audience. Sometimes you don’t get to know someone if all they do is say ‘I joined this club, then I left that club, then I had two children…’ You don’t get to know someone if they just list their achievements. You need to dig, and you’re only going to dig if you do it with a good collaborator."

"Yes, it’s an interesting book, this one. It looks sort of flimsy, like a PhD paper you might pull out of a university library. It doesn’t scream at you: ‘This will be a rollicking great read!’ But it really is. One of the quotes on the front says: “Phenomenal!” And it is phenomenal, because the women in it are phenomenal. If you know about women in sport, and understand the trials and tribulations of being a woman in sport, you might not be so surprised. But I think the majority of readers will be absolutely blown away by what women can achieve in the most gruelling races like ultra marathons. This has been going on for well over a century: women have found that they can beat men over very, very long distances. The more gruelling and longer the race, the better they do. If it requires very little sleep, women tend to be better able to cope than men. There are stories of women doing these incredibly, incredibly onerous runs while breastfeeding. It’s just phenomenal what women can achieve. “Readers will be absolutely blown away by what women can achieve in the most gruelling races” There are two truths that seem contradictory in this book. One is that, anecdotally, it seems women are better than men over a certain distance. But, two: the science just isn’t there yet. There isn’t enough scientific investigation to support that argument, so we can’t be absolutely sure. We can guess why it might be the case: fat reserves, what a woman’s body goes through when it goes through child birth, and so on. But there just isn’t enough known about the physiology and biology of women. So we don’t get the big hurrah conclusion, the eureka moment you would like from a book like this. But I don’t think that necessarily detracts from the book, because you are introduced to a succession of female protagonists who are all magnificent. For me, they are mainly magnificent for their matter of factness. They have a few babies, they start running because they need the money to feed these babies, they read about a race and the little pot of gold you get if you win it, and they think: ‘Well, you know, I could do that.’ Of course, there were often men who concluded they couldn’t possibly have done it, but there are far more women than I realised who have competed in and succeeded in these incredible ultra-marathon races and left men in their wake."

"As chair of the award, I often tell people that the award is important because it has improved the standard of writing about sport. People do write better about sport than they used to. It’s not entirely down to the Sports Book of the Year prize, but it is partly. One of the significant things this year has been how much hard work and effort has gone into a lot of the books that made the list. Miguel’s book is a prime example. Boy, has he done his research! This is not something cobbled together, it is minutely observed and crafted. Now, that could lead to two things: first, a treatise that is not very accessible, or second, a very readable and very engaging book. You feel like you’re in the brain of Miguel, and his soul as well. You can feel that this is a serious subject that requires as much research as possible, but also a subject he cares about emotionally. You just feel this is someone who loves sport—in this case, football—and doesn’t like what’s happening to it because of the rise of sportswashing. He takes you through the big, big picture of it. So: the history of sport and money, which is another way you could describe this book. He looks at all aspects of it. Sportswashing is something that bothers me a lot, and so I was a bit worried that I would just be depressed at the end of this. That it would say: look, the world is rubbish, money rules and sport is ruined. But, actually, he remains upbeat about it. He points to the innate passion of football fans and says it doesn’t have to be this way. Women’s football, for example, is almost the antidote to the elite men’s game, because they take their community with them. The people who go to watch women’s football don’t pay a huge amount of money to watch it. It remains part of the local community. So there’s hope, he says. If you ever wondered why the World Cup was held in a tiny, hot country like Qatar, this book explains the power of the oil rich nation."

"Donald McRae is a well known journalist, famous for his work on boxing, both in books and in his journalism. I think he is hinting that this is his last book about boxing, though he may change his mind. There is always something of him in what he writes, but he’s gone the extra mile on this one. There’s a lot about his relationship with boxing, a sport that often leads to terrible head injuries and even death. So he’s aware it is an odd sport to love when it can be so cruel. He explores that alongside grief in his own life—the death of his parents and his sister—he juxtaposes his grief and the grief of people he knows through boxing, when they’ve seen their loved ones in the ring getting battered. It’s a very moving book, and made all the more moving that this is sort of a life’s reflection, if you like. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that someone who has earned his money through the knowledge of boxing and the passion for boxing—that when he comes to really analyse how he feels about it, you’re left thinking that maybe you’ve wasted a lot of your life on this because it’s caused so much pain. It’s a difficult sport. Then just as you’re beginning to feel a bit depressed, he’ll throw in one of his beautiful descriptions of how a bout unfolded. And you’re reminded—or, well, I was reminded—that this is why I prefer literature about boxing to actually watching boxing. I find it quite difficult to watch, but I can read about it. I’d rather be one step removed."

"In the judge’s meeting, this was seen almost as a companion book to States of Play . They are both about sportswashing, but James Montague’s book is more focused on Saudi Arabia. So it’s a more localised view. And you get an awful lot of the fan voice, if you like. If States of Play is very big and grand, an overview, this goes into the nitty gritty. He goes into a pub in Newcastle and speaks to fans, who say—over quite a number of pages—why should we be the ones to have to worry about sportswashing? We’ve been waiting a long time for money to be invested into the club, so why do we have to stand up and say it isn’t right, and that we don’t want this money? Why should we be expected to be held to a higher level of political correctness? What you do tend to get in this book are lone voices who are sort of screaming into the wind, saying they don’t want Saudi money in an English football club, because nobody is really listening. You get a feel for how the Saudi decision to go into sport affects people on the ground. Weirdly, you could actually combine both these books on sports washing and get one big book that doesn’t contradict or repeat itself, because one is the macro view and one is the micro view."

"Well, even the judges—who know a lot about test cricket—were taught things they didn’t already know. That impressed them, because if you know your cricket, you think you know everything. It’s so nicely put together, diligently researched and calmly written so it allows itself to breathe. For example, the first test match was between Canada and the USA. You’d have said the first test match would be between England and someone, wouldn’t you? But even if you knew that little nugget, you are reminded of the context, and how it makes sense. He weaves through enough anecdotes, he takes you on a journey. I suppose it’s a bit like going on a posh, well though through, cruise ship around the world, rather than a cheap one dropping you off willy-nilly at different ports and hoping you have a nice time on the disco deck. It takes you on a journey that feels very natural; when he shifts from Australia to South Africa to India, you don’t think, ‘It’s jumping around all over the place.’ You feel like you have a good captain at the helm. It’s a thoughtful, meandering journey through sport. And it pulls off that unique thing where I think, as I said, it would be a great read for both someone who loves their test cricket but also someone who doesn’t Oh yes. If you were to do a graph of the standard of writing over the years, it just keeps inching up and up. There has not been a year where it’s plummeted, it’s always getting better. I think now it’s inevitable that there will be good writing on the shortlist, but the added ingredient this year was that level of research—the hard graft that has gone into these books. Then good writing on top of that, what more can you ask for?"