I’m not sure if it’s an age group or a certain type of football fan or just the sort of person who is loyal to Mississippi, but there is, no doubt, a certain group of Mississippians that perk up when the name Bull Sullivan is mentioned. In the story telling tradition of Mississippi there is a certain kind of story that doesn’t seem like it could be true but you sort of suspect that it is… Bull Sullivan stories are just those kind of stories. Tougher than the Junction Boys, using trees as tackling dummies, placing a guard at the practice field with a shotgun, and on and on…

In 1984 Frank Deford wrote a long story for Sports Illustrated called “The Toughest Coach there ever was” – it’s a great piece of sports writing – you can still read it online here. Nearly 40 years after Bull’s death the Frascogna’s have done a wonderful service for our state. We now have a document, a book we can read and keep, that re-tells many of those great stories. A book for folks who knew him, a book for those that have heard of him, and a book to educate a whole new generation of the man who truly was The Toughest Coach there ever was.

Come to our book signing tonight – appearing with the Frascogna’s will be Bill Buckner, one of Bull’s most storied players. If you can’t make it you can order a signed copy of Bull Cyclone Sullivan on our site here.

LeBron has made “The Decision.” Baseball is into the dog days of summer. The World Cup has flopped to a finish. Fortunately, this means we are just days away from…

…the 2010-2011 NFL football season (woohoo!). Most teams will open their training camps over the next few days, and for the first time ever, the New Orleans Saints will open the season as the defending Super Bowl Champions.

Now, the Saints open camp on July 29th, but we’ve still got a month and a half before a real game (and 3 weeks until the preseason exhibition games begin) — and if you find yourself waiting just a little impatiently, you can fill your football appetite with a couple new books:

Home Team, by the Saints’ head coach Sean Payton, recounts the synchronized rebuilding of New Orleans and the Saints post-Katrina. Sports exist as artificial, contrived conflicts, but a team can take on significance because it stands as a symbol for the fans, for its home city, particularly for a city beleaguered like New Orleans was after the storm. Payton was perfectly positioned to see how the city, struggling with the rebuilding effort, and weary from years and years of poor Saints teams, latched onto the team as proof that New Orleans could thrive.

The perfect companion book is Drew Brees’ Coming Back Stronger. Brees’ book covers the same time period as Payton’s (as you’d expect), but with the added personal dimension of Brees’ own career struggles. Brees is now mentioned along with Manning and Brady as the best QBs in the league, so it’s easy to forget that during his time with the Chargers, he was widely regarded as an accurate, but weak-armed game-manager who could be trusted to hit tight ends and running backs, but couldn’t win the big game for you — and that was before he suffered a devastating shoulder injury that many predicted would sap what little arm strength he had. Brees’ story of rebuilding his own career dovetails perfectly with the Saints’ rise to the the championship.

I’ve already written my requisite April baseball book review, but after finishing Will Leitch’s new book Are We Winning? the other night, I decided I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Leitch’s last book,  God Save the Fan, was a drive-by-shooting of sports anecdotes and pop culture references, blasting away with well-aimed snark at ESPN and the mainstream sports media. When I saw Leitch had another book coming out, I figured it’d be more of the same, just directed at the baseball community. And there’s a place for that, to be sure, but I find snark something to be consumed in small quantities.

I was surprised, then, to find that Leitch has attempted something a bit more difficult: a book about baseball and fathers. Let me rephrase that — he’s attempted something that’s a bit more difficult to do well. It’s not terribly difficult to write about baseball and fathers; the two subjects are so enmeshed in the psyche of every American male that ever played (or coached) t-ball that it’s harder to separate the two ideas than to conjoin them. The problem, as with other seemingly obvious concepts, is that it’s so familiar to us, that we are so ready to travel down well-worn mental paths, it becomes almost impossible to avoid the ready cliches and pithy truisms attached to the ideas.

Leitch accomplishes something more than cliches and truisms. The structure of the book follows a trip Leitch took with his father and family friend to see a 2008 game between the Cardinals and the Cubs, but it’s the moments between the bits of baseball that push the book along. It’s refreshing to see a writer deliver an honest portrayal of his father without lapsing into psychological blame-shifting or whitewashed hagiography. There are momentary self-indulgences — I know more about Will Leitch’s Little League career than I probably need to — but they are forgivable, and most of the personal anecdotes serve the purpose of the book well enough.

While writing the book, Will Leitch requested that readers send in their own memories and stories of baseball and fatherhood. Leitch and his wife read through them all, and then selected pieces to open each chapter. I looked forward to the beginning of each chapter — the paragraph or two reinforced the universal experience from a slightly different, uniquely personal perspective. Some of the stories are funny, some of them are sad, and a few of them were both funny and sad in unexpected ways, like the father who purchased a left-hander’s glove for his son (reasoning that right-handed folks should wear their baseball gloves on their right hands) and forced his son through half of the Little League season throwing with the wrong hand before the coach realized what had happened.

There’s a little too much mythologizing about the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry for this Tigers fan, but I can’t begrudge any true baseball fan the right to talk excessively about his or her hometown team. For example, as this is my blog, I feel fine letting you know that the Tigers have won 5 in a row and are just a half-game back from the AL Central division lead. You may not care, but I do. And if you care about baseball, or ever cared about baseball, then Are We Winning? is worth a read, to be reminded that for most fans, baseball didn’t start with multimillion dollar salaries, steroid allegations, and luxury taxes — it began with a game of catch in the backyard, or t-ball season, or a trip to the minor-league park to see real baseball for the first time.

When April rolls around, I know it’s time to highlight some of the best new baseball books for the year — now is the best time to do your baseball reading, before September arrives and your team blows a 3 game lead over the last 4 games. But it’s April and the Tigers are contending for the AL Central division lead, so baseball still makes me happy. Let’s move on to the books before I break into Terrance Mann’s speech from Field of Dreams (“It’s baseball, Ray”).

The Baseball Codes is a look at all the unwritten rules of baseball — all the little traditions that basically structure every part of the game not already dictated by the official rulebook. In a game where pitchers throw 95 mph fastballs within inches of (and sometimes directly at) hitters, it’s easy to understand how a complicated and subtle system of self-policing has developed — this book is your guide to that and more.

High Heat is a history of the most important pitch in baseball: the fastball. It’s the most thrown pitch in baseball, and even the guys who don’t have a great fastball use it to set up their better pitches. We can even track pitchers on a pitch by pitch basis, to know what pitcher has the fastest average fastball (the current 2010 leader is Detroit’s Joel Zumaya, who also led 3 out of the last 4 years), as well as the slowest average fastball (if we throw out knuckleball-outlier Tim Wakefield, then 47-year-old Jamie Moyer wins the “honor”, clocking in at 81.2 MPH). Accurate fastball data only goes back a few years, so author Tim Wendel has attempted to piece together through baseball folklore and first-hand accounts (when available) who was the ultimate flamethrower in baseball history.

If you’re tired of the modern TMZ/E! News/supermarket tabloid style of sports reporting, I’d recommend Jim Hawkins’ new biography of Al Kaline (and not just because I’m a Tigers fan). Kaline embodies everything great about baseball, and what his story lacks in the self-destructive tendencies so common in athlete-celebrities today, it makes up for in his exemplary dedication and hard work. Added bonus: not a single page devoted to steroid allegations, stolen girlfriends, or Congressional oversight panels.

Joe Posnanski’s The Machine actually came out last year, but it’s worth another look if you missed it. Posnanski is one of my favorite baseball writers, and he’s delivered arguably the definitive story of the 1975 Reds here. If you want to understand what Joe Morgan is rambling on about during ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball when he compares every team to his old Reds team (and every player to a Reds teammates of his), this is the book. I’d also like to thank Joe (Posnanski, not Morgan) for mentioning on his blog that you can buy his book at independent bookstores — we appreciate the support.

I consider myself to be somewhat of a lukewarm basketball fan. I enjoyed playing in junior high and high school, but I was never very good. I’ll follow a couple of college teams (and of course March Madness), but I don’t usually pay much attention to the NBA until the playoffs start. As a kid I didn’t read basketball books or stories, or study basketball statistics like I did with baseball. I never had an understanding of basketball history or what players were historically important.

Bill Simmons wrote The Book of Basketball for people like me. The book has several different sections — among others, there’s a chapter that outlines every watershed moment in the NBA, a chapter that discusses every controversial MVP award, and a chapter that compares Wilt and Russell in just about category you could imagine.

The meat of the book is Simmons’ tiered ranking of the 96 best players of all time. Each player’s impact on the game is discussed over several pages. Simmons reviewed old taped games and original sports stories from the early days of the ABA and NBA to construct his rankings, and I found this information to be the most interesting. It’s easy enough to say that Elgin Baylor was “great” or “unique” — it’s another to go back and see what the sportswriters were saying about him, what his teammates and opponents were saying about him, and compare his impact with his peers. You may disagree with the order of his player ranking, but ultimately, that’s really kind of the point — to spark awareness and discussion about the history of the ABA and the NBA, before the great players of the past are lost to public memory.

Lemuria is having our own version of the Egg Bowl right here in the store!!! That’s right, Ole Miss and Mississippi State Fans come to Lemuria and support your school of choice.  We have some new books and merchandise  that you are going to want for yourself and to give as gifts.

“Hotty Toddy!” The University of Mississippi Football Vault®: The History Of The Rebels® takes you on a journey through Ole Miss football history, starting with the first game in 1893. Along with a story woven by award-winning reporter Billy Watkins of The Clarion-Ledger, this “scrapbook” contains never-before-published photographs, artwork and memorabilia drawn from the Ole Miss athletic department, campus archives and personal collections. Tucked into dozens of sleeves and pockets are reproductions of old game programs, historic tickets, numerous postcards and vintage photos. No Rebel fan should be without this “home archive” of the Ole Miss football history.

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“Go State!” In the Mississippi State University Football Vault®: The History Of The Bulldogs, author Mike Nemeth takes you on a journey through the history of MSU football from that Thanksgiving Day in 1892 when a rag-tag band of students took on a faculty team in a game, through the glory years of Allyn McKeen, through Jackie Parker and D.D. Lewis to the present. This detailed “scrapbook” contains never-before-published photographs, artwork and memorabilia drawn from MSU’s athletic department and school archives. Tucked into dozens of pockets and sleeves, fans will find reproductions of old game programs, historic tickets, postcards, photos and much more. These fascinating replicas include an 1895 football button, a 1920 football banquet program, a 1934 Ole Miss game ticket, a 1940 season schedule, a 1980 Alabama game ticket and a 1998 SEC Championship Game ticket. No Bulldogs fan should be without this “home archive” of Mississippi State’s illustrious football history. Foreword by Rockey Felker, Afterword by Jackie Sherrill.

We will also have these great 2010 calendars which are replicas of classic game day program covers which can be framed after you are done with it!!

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****Just a side note we have these calendars for all the SEC schools but if you are a fan of another school ask us and we can see if we can order it for you!!!

So here is the deal,  you come in and purchase the book and/or the calendar and I am going to keep score and will post it periodically on the blog and in the store!!  We will continue this through Christmas and may the “BEST” School win!!!

The temptation to wax nostalgic exists in any sport. Baseball fans decry the rampant steroid use and remember when 50 home runs was a historic season. Basketball fans recall the great Lakers – Celtics rivalries and wonder if passing and defense will ever come back into style. And race fans pine for the days when the cars were beautiful and dangerous, not computer-laden pre-programmed speed appliances.

A. J. Baime’s book Go Like Hell recounts the battle between Ford and Ferrari at Le Mans in the late ’60s. The fight between the exclusive Italian marque and the American industry giant is at the center of the shift from the early days of unregulated automobile racing to the modern safety-conscious multi-billion dollar business that it has become.

More than just a book for race fans, Go Like Hell is really a lens into the clash of American and European cultures in the 1960s. Le Mans provides a focal point, but the story encompasses so much more — industrial globalization, the safety crusade led by Ralph Nader, and a personal battle between Enzo Ferrari and Henry Ford II.