The Chicago Bears are more than a football team - they are a legend. Founded in 1919, the Bears have won more regular season games than any other NFL franchise. With 26 players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and thirteen retired jerseys, it’s no wonder the Bears can be defined by three phrases: Big, tough, and full of characters. The Bears, like Chicago, are not just people. They are personalities. In Amazing Tales From the Chicago Bears Sideline, Bears fans can hear about the men who have made the Bears one of the greatest franchises in pro football....

In this hilariously funny essay collection, former ESPN columnist Rick Reilly com­piles the best of his sports columns - essays that include his expert opinion on athlete tattoos, NFL cheerleaders, and even running with the bulls in Pamplona.

Nate Jackson’s Slow Getting Up is an unvarnished and uncensored memoir of everyday life in the most popular sports league in America - and the most damaging to its players - the National Football League. After playing college ball at a tiny Division III school, Jackson, a receiver, signed as a free agent with the San Francisco 49ers, before moving to the Denver Broncos. For six seasons in the NFL as a Bronco, he alternated between the practice squad and the active roster, eventually winning a starting spot - a short, tenuous career emblematic of the average pro player.

For the past year, John U. Bacon has received unprecedented access to Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football team: coaches, players, and staffers, in closed-door meetings, locker rooms, meals, and classes. Overtime captures this storied program at the crossroads, as the sport’s winningest team battles to reclaim its former glory. But what if the price of success today comes at the cost of your soul? Do you pay it, or compete without compromising?

It is the greatest American underdog sports story ever told: how a team of college kids and unsigned amateurs, under the tutelage of legendary coach - and legendary taskmaster - Herb Brooks, beat the elite Soviet hockey team on their way to winning the gold medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. No one believed the scrappy Americans had a real shot at winning. Despite being undefeated, the US - the youngest team in the competition - were facing off against the four-time defending gold medalist Russians.

On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for that season's NFL Championship game. Football, growing in popularity amid America's post-war economic boom, was still greatly over-shadowed by the country's favored pastime - baseball - but the 1958 championship proved to be the turning point for pro football.

A back-up goalie's hilarious behind-the-mask look at life in the NHLJamie McLennan spent 20 years playing professional hockey. Sort of. As the backup for such legendary goalies as Grant Fuhr, Ron Hextall, Roberto Luongo, and Miikka Kiprusoff, he saw everything - except much playing time.

Life in the minor leagues of football, which NFL Europe has been aptly dubbed, can be funny, sad, profound and ludicrous all at the same time. At its heart, this six-team league is a short-stop away from either the glamour of the NFL or the bottom of the professional football scrap pile - a crossroads full of real-life drama where the joy of "making it" can be tempered by failure or injury with one misstep; where the difference between a multimillion dollar NFL contract and abject poverty may only be one play away.

With his flights of improvisation around the basket and his towering afro, Julius Erving became one of the most charismatic (and revolutionary) players basketball has ever known. But while the public has long revered this cultural icon, few have ever known of the double life of Julius Erving. Dr. J traces the inner lives of the nearly perfect player and the imperfect man - and how he has come to terms with both.

Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997, Don Shula remains the winningest coach of all time with 347 career victories and the only undefeated season in NFL history. But before he became the architect of the Dolphins dynasty, Shula was a hardworking kid selling fish on the banks of Lake Erie. As acclaimed sports biographer Mark Ribowsky shows, Shula met serious resistance at home when he asked to play high school football, but when his parents finally relented, they discovered that their son had an unmatched mind for the game's strategy and a stomach for its brutality. 

Over the course of the last five years, Tim Tebow established himself as one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of college football and a top prospect in the NFL. During that time he amassed an unparalleled resume - winning two BCS national championships; becoming the first sophomore in NCAA history to win the Heisman trophy; and in the face of massive public scrutiny, being drafted in the first round of the NFL draft by the Denver Broncos.

Once called a legend in his own time slot, Garry Marshall has been among the most successful writers, directors, and producers in America for more than five decades. In My Happy Days in Hollywood, Marshall takes us on a journey from his stickball-playing days in the Bronx to his time at the helm of some of the most popular television series and movies of all time, sharing the joys and challenges of working with the Fonz and the young Julia Roberts, the “street performer” Robin Williams, and the young Anne Hathaway, among many others.

Jalen Rose has never been quiet. Not as a kid growing up in Detroit in the '70s and '80s. Not as the brash, trash-talking leader of the legendary "Fab Five" at the University of Michigan. Not as the player under the stewardship of Hall of Famers Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas, and others throughout his 13-year NBA career. And certainly not as a commentator and analyst on ABC/ESPN and Grantland.

Comprised of exclusive interviews with Jets players, coaches, and other figures surrounding the organization, Sack Exchange: The Definitive Oral History of the 1980s New York Jets is an eye-opening account of a memorable era in one team's history, which also takes a step back and looks at the state of the National Football League as a whole during the 1980s.

It’s almost impossible to talk about Oakland football without bringing up the name of the consummate Raider, Tom Flores. Legendary for both his skills on the field and his coaching guidance from the sideline, Flores has been an integral part of the Raiders organization since its inception in 1960. Now Flores shares the greatest stories and anecdotes from his time with the team in Tales from the Oakland Raiders Sideline.