THE MAG.COM PRESENTS:
ALL WORLD POWER RANKINGS

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Game of Shadows crew on da move.

WHEN IT COMES TO INFLUENTIAL SPORTS BOOKS, GAME OF SHADOWS TRUMPS ALL!

Today is International Literacy Day, ironic for us because we had a conversation last Friday night about how generally poorly read we were (Fetch is sitting on one of our shelves, and we haven't even started the thing yet). To celebrate the day, we decided to rank the most influential sports books ever. Here goes nada.

TOP 5
RANK (YESTERDAY)		WHAT	WHY
	1 (14)	GAME OF SHADOWS (MARK FAINARU-WADA AND LANCE WILLIAMS)	This tome broke the Bonds story wide open, from "general suspiscion" to "outright accusation," (it basically read like Bonds' diary at times). In the process it likely changed the filter through which we perceive an entire period of baseball. That's kind of a big deal. And it wasn't even written by sportswriters!
	2 (411)	THE SWEET SCIENCE (A.J. LEIBLING)	A.J. Liebling has been called "pound-for-pound the best boxing writer of all-time," and we can't really argue. The book is basically a series of New Yorker profiles on boxers, and if we know anything about sports, it's that The New Yorker covers it way better than you'd expect ("He had to do it, Dog. He had to do it.") It's a perfect look at why boxing is fascinating and brutal at once. Bonus: our man Michael Woods blogs at a similarly named site!
	3 (21)	BALL FOUR (JIM BOUTON)	We'll let "thumb" Richard Roeper explain this one: when we interviewed him for our Bull Durham package, he likened the eye-opening nature of that film to this book: "It was like reading Ball Four and finding out Mickey Mantle was a peeping tom!" If that's not influential, we have no idea what is. Bonus: Bouton is still somewhat blacklisted in baseball.
	4 (12,711)	A SEASON ON THE BRINK (JOHN FEINSTEIN)	Can you make a list like this and not have a Feinstein book in the Top 5? It's a physical impossibility. This might be the best of the entire lot.
	5 (899)	BOYS OF SUMMER (ROGER KAHN)	Our boss lives in Brooklyn, but he's a Sox fan, so don't think that colored this selection (one of our dads is a huge Brooklyn Dodgers fan, though, and that might have!) This is a ridiculously good book in that it paints a picture of the Dodgers at their finest and their absolute lowest in the same volume.

HONORABLE MENTION
RANK (YESTERDAY)		WHAT	WHY
	18 (144)	DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON (ERNEST HEMINGWAY)	You make any "list of the most influential books" and don't include Hemingway, you're pretty much not doing justice to the list. This one's all about bullfighting (ala Sun Also Rises), so it works for our efforts. Bonus: Hemingway started out as a sportswriter for The Kansas City Star.
	28 (1 forever!)	FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (BUZZ BISSINGER)	Real tough call here. Do you go Paper Lion? Semi-Tough? Fever Pitch? North Dallas Forty? The Best Sportswriting in America series? We took Friday Night Lights for a few reasons: (1) best portrait of Texas football ever penned, probably; (2) helped inspire the TV show that we all love; (3) represented a time Buzz Bissinger didn't despise the independent media; (4) Carl Edwards apparently loves this book as well.

RISING AND FALLING
MOVEMENT		WHAT
		HEAVEN IS A PLAYGROUND BY RICK TELANDER (Bed-Stuy hoops never dies)
		LITTLE T LEARNS TO SHARE BY TERRELL OWENS (What the…)

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