The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn't Enough (Hardcover)

by Steve Friedman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Friedman brings together essays written over the last 20 years into a fascinating anthology. The individual pieces concern sports as varied as bowling, cycling, basketball, boxing, and golf, but they are linked by a common theme: the pursuit of excellence as a path to self-destruction. For example, take Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree, a man so determined to excel that he built his own bike (out of washing-machine parts and other scrap metal) and pitted himself against the giants of the sport. He won, too, and kept winning until cycling's regulating body changed its rules to prevent him from competing; so he changed his technique, and they changed the rules again. Finally, after he started coughing up blood months after a race, his career came to a close. His story—and the book is full of stories just like his—perfectly illustrates the physical and psychological toll that the drive to win can take on a person. An apt counterpoint to the multitude of winning-is-everything books, this one says that winning is nice, but it isn't everything (and maybe, in some cases, it can be lethal). Pitt, David

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1 edition (October 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559708514
• ISBN-13: 978-1559708517
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #179,744 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Love This Book, December 3, 2007

By	W. Conway (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

... so much so that I am giving them to my athletically inclined friends and family for Christmas. But sports are only the hook. These stories are really about what it means to be human, whether it is flawed, transcendent, tortured, loved, reviled or just plain crazy - all of it. Steve is just flat out a great writer, so every story worked for me on some level. Highly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it., November 26, 2007

By	Nicholas Kelsh "nkelsh" (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I wish Steve would do volume two. I hated to see it end. The juxtaposition of eclectic story lines really makes it work. It's a perfect gift for the thinking sports fan. I'm giving three this Christmas.

3.0 out of 5 stars Good writing, not true to the title, April 15, 2009

By	PerpetualStudentSC - See all my reviews

This is a collection of the text of 14 of Friedman's articles that he wrote for various magazines and gathered here for a book. You can tell that some of the articles were kind of a stretch to fit within the scope set by the title of the book (an essay about going to play golf with your dad? An OK story, but it has nothing to do with "Champions, and the price they pay for glory"). Some articles were very good, but the whole was not cohesive. The relevant stories seem to boil down to an unstable athlete pushing him/herself beyond normal limits due to mental illness or some kind of rough childhood, and/or self destructing afterward. It's interesting, and an easy read, but not really what I was expecting.