What is your favorite sports-related book?

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 10: A fan of the North Carolina Tar Heels (L) and the Duke Blue Devils pose for a photo while holding a sign referring to the Duke/UNC rivalry during the semifinals of the ACC Basketball Tournament at Barclays Center on March 10, 2017 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Photo by Lance King/Getty Images) | Getty Images

This question is a little farther afield than our usual UNC-related Questions of the Day, but bear with me here. The other week, I was visiting a friend in Columbus, Ohio, and this friend took me to The Book Loft, reportedly one of the country’s biggest independent bookstores. Each room of The Book Loft corresponds to a different genre or set of genres, and in my exploration, I happened upon a small nook that contained their Sports offerings.

And I was immediately reminded how paltry the usual offerings are in this realm. There are a couple of standouts and classics, to be sure, but nearly everything else, certainly everything that’s made most visible, is either a love letter to an entire sport that’s so general as to be nearly meaningless, or a coach/player auto/biography that covers the same beats and sports cliches that we’ve all heard a million times before. The relevant and notable exception, of course, is To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe:

Not only is Blythe’s book ideologically agreeable, it’s a genuinely excellent bit of writing. Blythe, much more successfully than , not only fleshes out the personality of the UNC-Duke men’s basketball rivalry, but writes skillfully about individual games and players, the backdrop of the urban/suburban American South that animates everything about this contrast, and does it all through what’s usually the hopelessly boring genre of “inside the locker room for a season” (The 2024 national champion women’s soccer team released a documentary about their season that follows this format, and it is unfortunately an absolute nothing-burger. It’s not the participants’ fault; their job is not to make interesting media, but it was still disappointing). It’s funny, nostalgic, and moving, and its specificity to the UNC-Duke rivalry, let alone the season it focuses on, gives the reader real emotions with which they can identify, whether or not they have experience in this particular relationship. Blythe’s work makes clear what should be a wider-spread rule of writing: Specifics are more general than generalities.