Ted Kluck has lived the sporting life, both inside the arena, as a professional indoor football player and high-school football coach, and out, as a biographer of athletes such as Jeremy Lin and Robert Griffin III. Here, he recommends 5 books on the overlapping terrain of football and faith.

The Courting of Marcus Dupree, by Willie Morris

Morris, onetime editor in chief of Harper’s magazine, was a novelist and memoirist who wrote beautifully about things that weren’t football. When he chose to write about football, the result was this stunner of a story, about a stud high-school running back from small-town Mississippi. Race, poverty, recruiting ethics, education, and religion intersect in the Deep South as they do in this book, a perfect example of what creative nonfiction should aspire to.

Competition, by Gary Warner

If you grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, you might remember all the prosperity-addled Christian sports dreck (“trust God, and all your dreams will come true!”). This is what we should have been reading instead. Full of honesty and truth, Competition helped me navigate conflicted feelings about sports: I wondered why I wasn’t having more fun, and when God would answer my selfish prayers for a “platform” for sharing my faith. Warner taught me that glorifying God through sports is less about winning than about personal growth and refinement.

The Boz, by Brian Bosworth and Rick Reilly

Brian Bosworth (“the Boz”) played linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks during the 1980s. One of the first anti-hero athletes obsessed with cultivating a distinct “brand” (nowadays, they’re a dime a dozen), he wrote this book during a period of deep excess and idiocy. ...

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