In an era when too many heroes have been toppled from too many pedestals, Sandy Koufax stands apart and alone, a legend who declined his own celebrity. As a pitcher, he was sublime, the ace of baseball lore. As a human being, he aspired to be the one thing his talent and his fame wouldn't allow: a regular guy. A Brooklyn kid, he was the product of the sedate and modest fifties who came to define and dominate baseball in the sixties. In Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, former award-winning Washington Post sportswriter Jane Leavy delivers an uncommon baseball book, vividly re-creating the Koufax era, when presidents were believed and pitchers aspired to go the distance. He was only a teenager when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley proclaimed him "the Great Jewish Hope" of the franchise. But it wasn't until long after the team had abandoned Brooklyn that the man became the myth. Old-fashioned in his willingness to play when he was injured and in his acute sense of responsibility to his team, Koutax answered to an authority higher than manager Walter Alston. When he refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, he inadvertently made himself a religious icon and an irrevocably public figure. A year later, he was gone -- done with baseball at age thirty. No other sports hero had retired so young, so well, or so completely. Despite Sandy Koufax's best efforts to protect his privacy, his legend has grown larger ever since. Part biography, part cultural history, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy gets as close to that legend as he will allow. Through meticulous reporting and interviews with five hundred of his friends, teammates, and opponents, Leavy penetrates the mythology to discover a man more than worthy of myth.

"A great American sport and Native American history come together in this true story of how Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner created the legendary Carlisle Indians football team"--

Passionate researchers of Brazilian football rushed to their computers, as soon as Germany put an end, on the lawn of the Mineirão Stadium, to one of the greatest disasters in Brazilian and world football. It was necessary to explain “that”. Probably what no one knew is that more than 60 years ago, through similar debacles, journalist and writer Willy Meisl, an Austrian naturalized Englishman, had taken the same step. Hungary had perpetrated two “shakes” on the very honorable English Team—one of them, a crushing 6-3 on the sacred Wembley lawn—and it had to explain “that.” Willy knew what he was talking about. Having migrated to England as a fugitive from World War II, he was passionate about English football. But his critical eye, sharpened by the company of his brother Hugo, who created international fame for being mentor and coach of the incensed Austrian “Wunderteam” of the 1920s, could not understand why his now compatriots did not see that English football was going downhill, opening the way to go from being a creator to supporting the football association, at world level. From astute observations, critical eye and profound knowledge, based on much study and observations, Willy Meisl produced, in the mid-1950s, SOCCER REVOLUTION —one of the greatest classics of football literature that @LivrosdeFutebol has the honor of launching now, in electronic (e-book) and paper (on demand) version by Amazon®. The preface of the Brazilian edition is by the English journalist Tim Vickery, chosen for being English, working with football and not living in his homeland, facts that bring his biography closer to that of Willy Meisl. The translation and update notes are by Brazilian journalist Pedro Muxfeldt.