The Best Sports Books of 2024: The William Hill Award

Before we go through the books that made the 2024 shortlist, can you tell me about the prize and what kind of sports books you, as judges, are looking for?

The prize is 35 years old. It came about because Graham Sharpe at William Hill bookmakers realized there was a gap in the market. There seemed to be awards for everything except sports writing. It had a modest beginning and has grown and grown. I’m a sportswriter and I wanted to become involved with the prize because it was tangible to me that the award was improving sports writing.

It’s a generalization, but in the past sports books were bought at Christmas for that difficult-to-buy-for grandfather or for kids who just wanted to look through pictures of their favorite sports stars. You’d get a raft of ghostwritten autobiographies that were pretty basic: the quality of the writing was never really the priority.

The William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award has played its part in stepping up the quality of that writing. 35 years on, we’ve reached a point where the standard of sports writing is, I think, comparable to other literary awards. And that’s certainly reflected in this year’s shortlist—and has been over the past seven or so years. You get some proper, beautiful pieces of writing about sport.

Personally, I think most sports books should be judged on: ‘Would a non-sports lover or someone who isn’t into that particular sport get enjoyment from the book?’ I’m passionate about sport. It’s my living. If you can convey to people who are ambivalent or not particularly passionate about it that bottled in sporting activity is the very best of what a human being can produce and feel and need, then sport writing has done its job.

I remember reading boxing books simply because they’ve made the shortlist of the William Hill. I’m not someone who watches or reports on boxing very much at all. It’s not a passion of mine. But the writing swept me away. You can read a book about cricket or football or boxing and not know anything about the sport—but the writing should elevate it to a point where you’re immersed, and you love it.

That’s the overview of what the award tries to achieve, but every year is different. The judging panel somehow comes up with a different vibe about what’s important from the books. This year the judges chose, as the winner, a book that anyone could be given on Christmas morning and think highly of no matter their age or experience of that sport. It’s a good solid sports read.

Yes, tell me about the book that won, which is about tennis. It’s called The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation by Conor Niland.

Conor was on the tennis circuit. He rubbed shoulders with the greats of the game, like Roger Federer and so on, but he never quite made it. He had his moments in the spotlight, but it’s a grinding life being on the lower rungs. If you know somebody who’s got a kid who’s thinking of making tennis their career, they should read this book first because it’s not fun.

Conor studied English literature at university and he applies a literary brain to all his experiences. There’s humour in the book, a lot of self-deprecation and insight. He’s quite open and honest. That’s one of the key things that the judging panel liked about it. He doesn’t hide anything. He clearly loves his family a lot, but they do come over as quite pushy and he accepts that you won’t achieve anything in individual sport without a pushy parent.

It starts very young in tennis! He talks about one of his neighbours, who ends up as a rugby player, but starts getting serious much later.  

That’s well-known. If you look at the people who win in tennis, they’re the ones who started the, ‘Oh, you have to train on Christmas day’ thing because they knew one of their competitors somewhere, aged 11, was also competing and training. You don’t have a day off at all.

The Racket won, I think, because it has a little bit of everything in it. As chair of the judging panel, it does invariably cross my mind. ‘What will people think? Is this going to be a shock winner? Will people like it?’ So many people have said to me that they absolutely love this book. People who’ve read all the books on the shortlist say they hoped it would win. People who have picked it up or given it to someone because they like tennis have said, ‘Wow.’

It really is a book that spreads across the community and it’s not just for someone who’s a tennis nut. In Conor Niland you will recognize someone who has to work really hard and never quite gets there; you will understand.

It’s the first tennis book to win the prize, isn’t it? Which is surprising.

Yes, the Andre Agassi book probably should have won. It might have come out at the wrong time of year. That sometimes happens: a book feels like it’s been around forever and loses its freshness. But tennis books have featured on the longlist and shortlist a lot.

Let’s turn to the other books on the shortlist. First up is These Heavy Black Bones by Rebecca Achieng Ajulu-Bushell, who was an international swimmer, first for Kenya and then for Great Britain. Can you tell us a bit about her and the book and why it’s on the shortlist?

It’s on the shortlist because of the quality of the writing. It’s beautifully written.

Rebecca was the first black woman to represent Team GB, the British Olympic team, in the pool. Swimming is quite a difficult sport to write about. It’s pretty repetitive. It’s quite good fun at the Olympics when you’ve got a raucous crowd and you can hear the commentary over the top, and all the passion that a big sporting occasion brings. But if you strip it back, it’s relentlessly dull. It’s backwards and forwards and you can’t see the face of the person competing. They’re hidden by their goggles and the water. You’re just guessing what they might be thinking or feeling.

What Rebecca does is she turns all that repetitiveness and the tough training into a form of poetry. There are passages where she’ll write about the relentlessness I’ve just described, but it sounds gorgeous. It might sound painful, but in a poetic way.

She’s a black face in a sea of white faces at her college. There is the prejudice that ‘black people can’t swim’, that she has to deal with. She finds it very tough discovering her own identity in a strange world, whilst also trying to think like an elite athlete.

What’s the main message she’s trying to get across in the book, do you think?

I haven’t asked her, but I suspect there might be a narrative around her sporting career. She quit the GB team ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games: her promise fizzled out slightly. When that happens, there are invariably question marks about your commitment to the sport. In my opinion, she was trying to express, ‘This was very hard. I had so much stacked against me. I just ran out of…’ You can almost feel the air leaving her, the energy draining away towards the end of the book. It’s a way of saying, ‘This is my story. This is what it felt like from my point of view. I don’t care what it looks like from the outside—it looks like an unfulfilled ambition—but this is how difficult it is.’ She just couldn’t keep putting up with the tough training regime and the bias she perceived against her.

You can learn as much from people who don’t quite make it as from those who do. That failure—although I’m sure Rebecca wouldn’t like me to call it a failure—underlines just how remarkable it is when someone does succeed. She’s showing us just how tough it is. You need those crumbs of victory to keep you going. That’s a really enjoyable element in the book—how those mini triumphs along the way help her put up with the early starts and the late finishes and the relentlessness of it.

Let’s go on to When I Passed the Statue of Liberty I Became Black by Harry Edward (1898-1973). This is a very different book, the memoir of Britain’s first black Olympic medal winner, at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp.  

Yes, the Harry Edward memoir is probably the most unusual book that’s ever made the shortlist of the award in its entire history. It’s a lost memoir. He tried to get it published in the 1970s, but publishers said it wasn’t interesting enough. It’s unbelievable, anyone would think that.

What you do is you accompany him through the great landmarks of history. Wherever things are happening, he turns up. It’s absolutely remarkable. Then, in the middle of it all, you’ve got him going to America, which is why it’s called When I Passed the Statue of Liberty I Became Black. He’s self-educated, very well-read, very forward-thinking, very liberal. And yet he explains the racism of going to America and just being seen as black, and therefore all you can do is wash the dishes in a restaurant. Never mind all the qualifications you’ve got. But he doesn’t write it in a bitter way at all. It’s more like, ‘Oh well, this is another little hurdle I have to get over.’ He just keeps pushing and pushing to make sure he impacts the world as much as he can. He just seems to be the most kind, lovely person that emerges from these pages, with so much to offer.

I can’t list for you all the things he gets involved in. He’s just a bundle of energy. His Olympic journey is a tiny part of his bigger picture. It’s almost like competing at the Olympic Games was just one in a list of 150 things that he did in his life. It did go slightly wrong. It does sound like he probably should have won gold rather than bronze, but you can never know for sure why these things turn out the way they do. He’s a history maker in terms of the Olympics, but for him it’s just another chapter in the many chapters of a remarkable life.

We’re not reading the memoir in its pure form. It has been edited with a bit of digging around in the history with things woven in to add context. But it is a memoir and who doesn’t like a lost memoir?

It reads a bit like an old-fashioned Pathé newsreel. It’s very proper and he’s relentlessly upbeat. I find that quite delightful, that style. There’s not too much introspection. But you could argue it sounds like a list of your life, as opposed to going deep into it and adding texture. That’s possibly the reason it didn’t get published in the 70s. But because time has now passed, this odd style actually adds to the sense of, ‘This is a remarkable memoir by a remarkable man.’

That snapshot of him—this international sports star—arriving in the US. He’s been staying at a fancy hotel in Paris but ends up in a hostel in Harlem: I find that interesting, just in terms of the history.

It’s a firsthand account of what it felt like to have a whole nation judge you by the colour of your skin—when that hasn’t been the predominant way you’ve been treated up until that point. It’s quite a rare insight, isn’t it? Most people are born into their circumstances and stay within them and are constrained by them. But Harry Edward did things back to front. He was a success, and then suddenly he was washing dishes.

Let’s go on to Unique. This is a memoir by Kelly Holmes, a British middle-distance runner, who won big at the 2004 Athens Olympics, is that right?

Yes, she’s the double Olympic champion for Team GB. This is an updated memoir, if you like. She has written memoirs before but, crucially, in those she left out the part about being gay. The joy of this book is that you can feel Kelly as if she’s in the room with you. Her relief and happiness at being able to not hide anything from you is palpable.

Although it’s a really upbeat book—it’s funny and it rollocks along—I found there to be a level of sadness there, that it took so long for her to be able to be true to herself. You might say, ‘The world isn’t like that now. You don’t have to hide your sexuality.’ But she was in the army, and the rules forbade you from being homosexual. It was something she’d been forced to hide. Then there was, ‘I’m an Olympic champion, I’m famous. Am I supposed to be a certain way? Do people expect me to be a certain type of person?’ It was doubly hard for her to come out when she was a famous figure because it had been instilled in her that what she felt was shameful.

So it was a very sort of specific set of circumstances that led to her own journey about being honest about her sexuality. But it is insightful. It reminds you that when someone you know or hear about says, ‘I’m gay’ it isn’t always an easy thing to do. You’ll have close family that might judge you, as well as the wider public.

You could also say, ‘Does it matter? Does anyone care?’ but if you’re hiding something, it really affects your ability to enjoy life. That’s the other message of this book. She had these wonderful moments in her life. She was beloved by the British public. The footage of her face when she crossed the finishing line is an iconic image in British society—that shocked joy and disbelief that she’d won. And yet she couldn’t really enjoy it fully, because she wasn’t being herself. In interviews, she was scared she might say something that would give it away.

Now all that’s gone and she’s just open about who she is and who she loves, you can feel that she’s a much, much happier person. That makes this a nice read.

Okay, let’s go on to Munichs by David Peace. This focuses on a football team, Manchester United. I think you’d better start by explaining what it’s about, as we’re going back to events that happened decades ago.  

The title of the book might confuse people: Why has he put an ‘s’ on the end of Munich? He does that because ‘Munichs’ is used as an insult, a way to taunt Manchester United fans. In 1958, a plane carrying their team back from a European competition crashed in Germany in the ice. A lot of the players on board died or were injured.

It was a team that was packed full of young talent. Sir Matt Busby was the manager, and they were called the ‘Busby Babes.’ The crash wrecked the Manchester community. There is something very poignant about these very young players: one minute you’re watching them run around playing football and scoring goals, and you’re cheering them, and the next minute they’re dead. That’s hard to compute. I cried about six separate times while reading this book. It is very, very moving.

It was also a strange plane crash, because some people were unscathed. They stood up and walked away wondering, ‘Oh? Something weird happened here. I don’t have my shoes on anymore.’ And a few seats further in front, their teammate was dead.

There’s a lot of heroism in the book. In Manchester, Jimmy Murphy keeps the club going. That’s the element of the book that’s really intriguing if you like your football. To fulfill matches, Murphy has to find players and get a team out. He’s lost his best players. Other clubs phone him up and say, ‘If we can help you out, we will.’ But when he actually tries to get their help they say, ‘Oh well, you know, it’s not really fair, is it?’

David Peace is a fine writer. He has a very distinct style. Some people say it’s a novel, not a sports book—but it’s a curious combination of the two. His research for this book has been incredible, you cannot accuse him of going off on flights of fancy without pinning down what happened. The fiction comes in in that it’s all internal monologue. It’s about what the people involved, the survivors, were thinking, how they’re coping. That’s made up. He can’t know what their inner monologue was. But because he’s done so much research, you believe it: it has an element of truth to it. You think, ‘Why wouldn’t they be thinking that way?’

Like These Heavy Black Bones, it’s a long piece of poetry, in a way. I think it’s the most accessible of the David Peace books. Someone called it Joycean, which makes it sound like a book you would not pick up. But it’s only Joycean in that it’s lyrical and beautiful. It is very accessible.

It’s a hard one. How can you recommend a book when it’s made you cry? I feel that’s an evil thing to do to someone. But if you’re thinking, ‘I might give that a miss, because it sounds like a James Joyce’ I would say, ‘No, give it a go, because it’s a very specific style and it will in some way enrich your life, even if you do cry like I did.’

Do you think it’d be a good book for somebody who isn’t into football or a Manchester United fan?

This book should be compulsory reading for people who do not like Manchester United, because it would stop them taunting them at football matches about the crash. It happened a long time ago, and opposition fans do still chant it. Tragedy chanting is illegal, but people still do it. If you read this book, you would not think about it as a joke ever again.

Finally on the shortlist we have My Beautiful Sisters by Khalida Popal, who was co-founder and captain of the Afghanistan women’s football team. This is another unusual book: it’s interesting to read about Afghanistan.

I wish this book had been eight times longer! It’s quite a short book, and it really should be longer.

Khalida is a remarkable woman. She’s living in a society where women’s rights are virtually non-existent. She’s obviously very intelligent and has quite a progressive family. That seems to give her the bravery to be quite bolshy. She says in the book that she’s stubborn. She is very stubborn and when she gets it in her head that women should be playing football, she doesn’t give it up—even though everyone tells her it’s a terrible idea. Her family suffers, because she’s bringing them shame in the view of the society and the authorities around her, but she perseveres. If you want to read a book about battling against the odds, this is the book for you.

Critics would say, ‘Why create a football team? How does that help Afghanistan women?’ For those who live outside that community and find it hard to compute just how appalling conditions are for women in Afghanistan, it allows us a point of comparison—through the vehicle of the football team that she helps to create.

Women across the world, at various points in history, have found it difficult to play organized sport. We’re still only catching up in the UK. We’ve made great strides in promoting women’s football, but only in the last 15 years. Organized football was banned by the Football Association until 1971. It’s taken a long time to recover from that and for people to accept that women can play football seriously in the UK, and we’ve looked jealously across at the United States, where the women’s football teams get more attention than the men’s.

Then you look across at Afghanistan, and you think, ‘Okay, you can times the problems we’ve had by a million.’ In a strict society where women are expected to do nothing at all except serve men, it’s almost unbelievable that she achieved her goal of creating a football team—although it transpires that the people who allowed that to happen were doing it to get money for grants and to look good to the outside world. There was no actual belief that women should play football.

Then, when the Taliban regained power, she had to find a way to extract the women in the team from Afghanistan, because they were at high risk of being arrested. Again, that brings up moral questions: Why would you place extracting a female football player above extracting a wife and mother? Why is being a football player more important? But she got some women out and that was a great thing.

Throughout it all, there is the pain she suffered, the losses she saw. Within a few sentences, you hear about her finding a goalkeeper. She tells her, ‘I think you’re really good, I’d like you to be my number one goalkeeper.’ This woman is utterly delighted but her family calls her a whore, and she sets herself on fire and dies.

It’s hard to compute that life. This is why My Beautiful Sisters is a really important book. Through the vehicle of sport, you get an insight into a society that we can barely imagine. Each chapter starts with a little phrase about how beautiful football is, a mini poem reminding you of the joy of completing a pass or scoring a goal. The book never loses sight of the beauty of team sport. That’s quite an achievement, I think, against the backdrop of the societal pressures that they all suffered.