Sports Outdoors
The following represents all books currently listed within the genre, Sports Outdoors:
Synopsis
It is August 1961 and a 6 year-old boy, sitting on his father’s shoulders, is watching a rugby match in south Leeds. He is immediately hooked on the experience of the sporting event, viewed live and in the flesh…
…Fast forward to August 2011. A man in late middle age is watching another rugby match.
John Rigg has been an “ordinary spectator” – not only of rugby (league and union), but of football and cricket and a range of other sports - for 50 years.
AN ORDINARY SPECTATOR: 50 YEARS OF WATCHING SPORT presents a unique perspective on why live sport is compulsive viewing.
Through its “Seven Ages of Watching Sport”, the book aims to be far more than a simple “I was there” catalogue of sporting events – major and minor – over the last five decades. Rather, it offers some perceptive insights into what we derive from sports spectating and - from an individual’s perspective - what watching sport tells us about ourselves.
Synopsis
Walk tells the story of a nightmarish scramble along the wild coastline of South Africa by the survivors of the wreck of the Grosvenor on 5 August 1782. Having decided to walk to the Cape of Good Hope, beginning at Lambasi in northern Pondoland, the few survivors ended up in the dune deserts not far from what we now know as
Port Elizabeth.
Walk takes the reader, step by step, day by day, on young William Hubberly’s horrific trek. While indisputably fiction, Walk sails a good deal closer to the historical truth than most nonfiction you will read and is a haunting parable on the meeting of Europe and Africa.
Synopsis
Cycling was already an adventure, but then…
Teenage bicycle racing phenom Emily Hampstead is training for a major race.
Retired Army nurse Hilda Paisley is traveling the USA on her bicycle. They meet by chance on a deserted road in Kansas, not suspecting that they’ll ever cross paths again.
Emily continues to win races to the delight and surprise of bicycle racing fans in the US and abroad. Her family moves to Virginia, where she attracts unexpected and deadly attention.
Meanwhile, after witnessing a terrorist attack, Hilda helps the police make arrests – and the terrorists add her name to their hit list. After escaping the immediate threat, Hilda reports to a temporary nursing job in a Southern hospital.
When Emily accepts Hilda's offer to ride to Canada – with Hilda's friend Jack – it promises to be a fun adventure.
If they can survive it.Please enter manually
Synopsis
This follow-up to his award-winning book AN ORDINARY SPECTATOR: 50 YEARS OF WATCHING SPORT (SilverWood Books, 2012) presents a collection of John Rigg’s wide-ranging sports writing over the subsequent five years.
STILL AN ORDINARY SPECTATOR: FIVE MORE YEARS OF WATCHING SPORT not only captures the thrill of watching some of the top sportsman of the modern era – Rory McIlroy, Robert Lewandowski, Cameron Smith et al – at the top of their game. By also evocatively describing local sporting events within their specific communities – high school American Football in San Antonio, Gaelic Football in County Mayo, club cricket in Saltaire – the book perceptively reflects on sport’s inherent capacity to act as a barometer of the society around it.
John Rigg provides a rich combination of contemporary detail and historical digression. He also writes warmly (and, at times, poignantly) of some of the casual acquaintances – a nun with a collecting box in Leeds, a famous Test Match umpire in Scarborough, a middle-aged football supporter in Paisley – whom he has encountered during this most recent stage of his long sports spectating journey.
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