I just finished Stan Isaacs’ Ten Moments That Shook the Sports World: One Sportswriter’s Eyewitness Accounts of the Most Incredible Sporting Events of the Past Fifty Years and I have to say I enjoyed it.
Isaacs is an award-winning former feature columnist for Newsday and has certainly been around the world of sports. He writes about ten events in sports history (all which he has witnessed personally) in great detail. Events such as Secretariat’s win at the Belmont Stakes in 1973, Bobby Thomson’s "The Shot Heard ‘Round the World" and the massacre of the athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The book is formatted into 10 chapters… one for each ‘moment’, in countdown fashion so it is evident Isaacs is helping your opinion which events had the most impact, at least in his experience. Maybe I being simplistic, but I enjoy books like these. They’re easy to pick up and read.
As a matter of fact, I didn’t even start with the beginning. I began with the chapter on the 1972 Munich Olympics for two reasons. One, I’m not that familiar with the event and two, the Olympics were starting up soon at the time and that I knew the mass media would be talking about it a little.
After that, I jumped around from Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot’, to Casey Stengel’s ‘Amazin’ Mets’ and kept reading till I read the whole book.
Isaacs strength (other than he actually witnessed these events rather than reading about them or watching them on a screen) is that he provides a good background for each of these events. For Bobby Thomson’s ‘Shot’, for example, he doesn’t start with the morning of the game. He provides detail on the rivalry between the Dodgers and Giants for the 1951 season (and even gives some background history).
Give the book a try. I really enjoyed it.
You can get it from Skyhorse Publishing or from Amazon