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12 sports books make a summer reading potluck

These 12 books range from the story of a family of baseball catchers to a tribute to the knuckleball to an introspective exploration by a woman rower and beyond. Together they offer a summer full of good reading.

8. ‘The Keeper: The Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them,’ by Tim Howard with Ali Benjamin

  • By Ross Atkin Contributor

In The Keeper, Tim Howard recounts his rise through the junior soccer ranks to the US national team, where in 2014 a record-breaking performance against favored Belgium in the World Cup tournament brought him international recognition. His fiercely competitive nature – what he calls his “addiction to winning” – has often been an asset, but he acknowledges it was what led to the dissolution of his marriage and the separation from his two children.Howard doesn’t shrink from reviewing the highs and lows of an athlete who has come out of the soccer shadows.

Here’s an excerpt from The Keeper: 

“[W]hen I trained with the Youth National Team, I got to do more than step out of class for a few minutes. I missed school for weeks at a stretch, several times a year as I traveled the globe.

“These weren’t glamorous trips. They were as grueling mentally as they were physically.

“It’s not merely that we traveled in bare-bones style – during one trip to Chile, for example, it was so cold we slept in our USA Soccer parkas and still couldn’t stay warm.

“It’s also that we were under the microscope. The coaches and administrators scrutinized our every move – what we wore, what we ate and drank, how we spoke to each other. You could tell they were sizing up our potential to represent the nation as senior players one day.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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